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Ten Classical Marxism and welfare: Karl Marx (1818–83) Frederick Engels (1820–95)

• Published: April 2010
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This chapter examines the arrival of classical Marxism in northern Europe, which reflected the industrial transformation and rise in power and size of the working class. It looks at Marx and Engels' views on human needs and human nature, as well as the materialist conception of history. A critique of capitalism is provided, and the chapter also considers the relevance of Marxism to feminism and the position of women in society. The chapter introduces the concept of a communist welfare state, and shows that Marxism places social class at the core of its social theory. However, it also reveals that the views of Marx and Engels were neither detailed nor original.

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Marxist approach to welfare

Marxist approach –

• argue as capitalism is about the exploitation of one social-class over another then social equality is impossible
• therefore the only purpose of the welfare system is as an instrument of the ruling-class, because welfare helps pacify the working-classes when in fact welfare is a form of social control
• this is because the welfare system provides education, preventing absolute poverty as well as providing effective and free health-care to the workers – so the state looks as if it cares when it doesn’t

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Elizabeth Wilson

Marxism and the 'Welfare State'

The Political Economy of the Welfare State footnote 1 by Ian Gough is the third book to appear in a series of educational texts, ‘Critical Texts in Social Work and the Welfare State’, edited by Professor Peter Leonard. The series is located by Peter Leonard within the ‘crisis’ and its aim is: ‘to address itself to explanations of the crisis which relate to the immediate material reality experienced by State workers in the welfare field and to link this to the economic, political, ideological and historical context within which the crisis occurs’. footnote 2 In his general introduction, Peter Leonard places an emphasis on the relationship of theory and practice, but within this scheme Ian Gough’s book is necessarily primarily theoretical. It is intended both as an account of the political economy of welfare and as a contribution to the Marxist debate concerning the nature of the capitalist state, a debate that has been engaged at a high level of theoretical sophistication for some years—in fact since the by now celebrated contributions by Ralph Miliband and the late Nicos Poulantzas which appeared originally in the New Left Review . footnote 3 Both Ian Gough’s book and the series of which it is part—a series intended for students and for practitioners rather than for Marxist theoreticians—raise particular issues with which I as a teacher of social work students am concerned. They also raise more general issues to do with the relationship of the economic, the political and the ideological; and to do with the general response of the left to the advent of the Thatcher government.

ical tradition which we reject. Nevertheless, the phrase has entered our language and for the moment we must continue to use it’.

Gough organizes his book round what he perceives as the two major contradictions within state welfare provision in capitalist societies (the book explicitly does not deal with socialist or with underdeveloped countries). The first of these contradictions is the simultaneous tendency for welfare provision to be both progressive and coercive; it does provide needed services, yet these may come in authoritarian forms and contain coercive elements; secondly: ‘the very scale of state expenditure on the social services has become a fetter on the process of capital accumulation and economic growth itself’. State expenditure on welfare supports capitalism yet simultaneously hinders it.

The opening chapters of the book constitute a careful exposition of the contradictory nature of the welfare state. Gough contrasts his own, Marxist, perspective, with the Fabian and functionalist explanations and accounts that have dominated the field of social policy and administration and points out how they tend either to stress the organismic and functionalist aspects of state provision (which responds to the ‘needs’ of capitalism) or to stress the subjective factors of personal choice, and pluralism. He then moves back in order to give a clear and accessible account of the Marxist approach to the capitalist economy, explaining what it says and what it claims to explain. In doing this he incorporates a necessarily condensed summary of the historical development of welfare provision in relation to the development of capitalism (the Factory Acts, the growth of public education and so on), and he makes passing reference to the role of ideology. He also sketches out briefly the historical divorce between bourgeois economics and bourgeois sociology and explains how Marxism overcomes this separation by rejoining the economic and the social that have been unnaturally divided in these disciplines. In other words, as Gough himself acknowledges, the scope of the book is ‘inevitably extremely broad’.

disabled, as well as the currently unemployed and often housewives, they represent a majority of individuals). Gough then turns to the development of welfare state provision in modern capitalist societies and describes the unique combination of the meshing of the class struggle for ‘welfare’ goods and services with the centralization and growth of the power of the modern capitalist state. Then, following a clear account of the expansion of social expenditure—an account of how the welfare state is financed, what is financed and why it has expanded so greatly—Gough turns to the effect of this on the capitalist economy. Here, as in the account of the state, Gough discusses in an appendix the more difficult aspects of the debate amongst Marxist economists attempting to answer the questions: has the growth of welfare expenditure benefitted or harmed the capitalist economy; and has it promoted or fettered profitability and the accumulation of capital?

Finally, Gough returns to the current economic crisis and his book ends with an account of the reasons for the development of this crisis and an assessment of its likely consequences for the welfare state, suggesting that this is likely to be ‘restructured’ rather than ‘dismantled’; he also points out the fresh contradictions to which attempts to cut back welfare spending give rise since they are often harmful to industry (e.g. demand for consumer goods is cut back) and fail to cure the problems for which they were perceived as being the remedy. Lastly, in a brief ‘political postscript’ Gough raises the issue of ‘human needs’ as relevant in ‘clarifying what is positive and what is negative’ in welfare policies. He has earlier pointed to the lack of development of a Marxist theory of human needs; and indeed the work of Mary McIntosh footnote 7 , who embarked on an approach to this question in two recent articles, would appear to be the only new work in this area. footnote 8 (More generally, the domination of the field of social welfare, policy and administration by Fabianism and functionalism has reflected an absence in the works of Marx himself, where references to the problems of social welfare are confined virtually to brief ‘asides’ or remain highly schematic, as in the section in his Critique of the Gotha Programme . footnote 9 )

Surprisingly, perhaps, in view of his emphasis on the crucial nature of class struggle, Gough’s conclusions are faint and rather pessimistic. The ‘golden era’ of the welfare state—the postwar boom—has gone and with it too, perhaps, must go the welfare state as we know it; either accumulation and economic growth or political and social rights may have to be sacrificed.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Marx's Political Thought

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Marx's Political Thought by Paul Blackledge LAST REVIEWED: 26 May 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 26 May 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0171

Karl Marx (b. 1818–d. 1883) is undoubtedly one of the most important and influential thinkers of the modern period. Nevertheless, although much of what he wrote has been sedimented into contemporary culture, many of his ideas, especially his political ideas, are far too scandalous ever to be fully incorporated into academic common sense. Part of the reason for this is that his legacy has consistently been attacked and misrepresented by individuals and groups who are, so to speak, on the other side of the barricades. At a much more interesting level, however, academic incomprehension of Marx’s thought is rooted in a structural gap between his totalizing methodology and academia’s tendency to fragment along disciplinary and sub-disciplinary lines. It is because Marx’s thought marks a profound break with this standpoint that any serious attempt to map his ideas onto the categories of modern academic thought will be fraught with dangers. Indeed, the deeply historical and revolutionary character of Marx’s thought makes it almost unintelligible from the essentially static perspective of modern theory. It is not that modern theory does not recognize change; it is rather that it tends to conceive it in effectively reformist terms: change is fixed within boundaries set by more-or-less naturalized capitalist social relations. Any attempt to write a study of Marx’s supposed political theory must therefore confront the problem that his thought cannot be fully incorporated within this standpoint. He was neither an economist nor a sociologist nor a political theorist, but his revolutionary theory involves the sublation of these (and more) categories into a greater whole. Consequently, though Marx’s thought can be said to have economic, political, and sociological, etc., dimensions, it cannot be reduced to an amalgam of these approaches, and critics should be wary of Procrustean attempts to fit aspects of his work into one or other academic sub-discipline, or indeed to reduce his conception of totality to a form of inter- or multi-disciplinarity. Specifically, whereas modern political theory tends to treat politics as a universal characteristic of human communities, Marx insists that it is a historical science: states, ideology, and law are aspects of broader superstructural relations that function to fix and reproduce minority rule within class-divided societies. Politics, from this perspective, is best understood as an epiphenomenon of the relations of production by which one class maintains its control over humanity’s productive interaction with nature: it has a beginning with the emergence of class societies, hopefully an end with what Marx calls the communist closure of humanity’s “pre-history,” and can only properly be understood by those involved in the struggle to overcome the conditions of its existence.

There are numerous Marxist journals available in the Anglophone world, each catering in differing degrees to academic and activist audiences from perspectives rooted in Marx’s legacy. The oldest continuously published journal on the English-speaking Marxist left is Science and Society , which was launched at the height of the “Popular Front” in 1936. Just over a decade later Monthly Review was launched in much less propitious circumstances at the beginning of the Cold War—and its editors faced the wrath of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Both journals were and continue to be open and independent vehicles of debate and analysis on the Marxist left. New Left Review , International Socialism , New Politics and Socialist Register were launched at the time of the British and American New Lefts at the turn of the 1960s and have continued publication as distinctive voices on the left long after the collapse of the movement that gave them life. Critique and Capital and Class came into being more than a decade later to cater to a new audience of ex-students who had been radicalized in the 1960s and subsequently moved into the academy. As the left went on the defensive in the 1980s, new journals such Capitalism Nature Socialism , Rethinking Marxism , Socialism and Democracy , and Studies in Marxism were launched to response to the crisis of Marxism as both social democracy and Stalinism retreated before neoliberal capitalism. More recently, since its launch in 1997 Historical Materialism has become an important voice on the academic Marxist left.

Capital & Class .

Launched in 1977 by the Conference of Socialist Economists in the United Kingdom. The initial focus of Capital and Class was, as its title suggests, on economic issues. Subsequently, however, it has expanded its remit to include articles on all aspects of Marxist theory.

Capitalism Nature Socialism .

Launched in 1988 by academics and activists in California, Capitalism Nature Socialism reflected a growing awareness that the emerging environmental crisis was a capitalist phenomenon best understood in terms drawn from but also extending Marx’s critique of political economy.

Launched in 1973 by Hillel Ticktin and others around him at Glasgow University, Critique is renowned for its analysis of Stalinism as a new and dysfunctional form of class rule and capitalism as an endemically crisis-prone system.

Historical Materialism .

Launched in 1997 by British activists and academics many of whom were affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party, Historical Materialism was intended to be, and has largely succeeded in becoming, the leading Anglophone forum for debate and theoretical innovation on the academic Marxist left.

International Socialism .

Launched in 1960 International Socialism was initially associated with a heterodox Trotskyist attempt by Tony Cliff and Michael Kidron to reorient the revolutionary left to the new postwar realities through, most importantly, their writings on Soviet state capitalism, the permanent arms economy as an explanation for the postwar boom, and “deflected permanent revolution” in the Third World. It has subsequently continued its focus on raising theory to the level of revolutionary practice and is linked to the British Socialist Workers Party.

Monthly Review .

Launched in 1949 by independent Marxists in New York, Monthly Review became associated most importantly with the work on modern capitalism by Paul Baran and Paul Sweey and more recently with John Bellamy Foster’s contribution to a Marxist analysis of the environmental crisis.

New Left Review .

Launched in 1960 by the merger of the two British New Left journals, Universities and Left Review and New Reasoner, New Left Review was initially conceived as a forum for activist debate. Very quickly thereafter it morphed into an austere academic journal under the auspices of Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, and Robin Blackburn and subsequently played a key role as gatekeeper of ideas from the Continental left to the Anglophone world. After a brief flirtation with Trotskyism in the 1970s, NLR has since become associated with Anderson’s pessimistic anti-capitalism.

New Politics .

Launched in 1961 by Julius and Phyllis Jacobson, New Politics is associated with Third Camp politics. This standpoint was most famously articulated in an essay first published in the journal in the journal in 1962: Hal Draper’s “The Two Souls of Socialism.” According to Draper, Marx’s ultra-democratic politics is best understood as a radical alternative to the statism of both Stalinism and social democracy which have more in common with each other than they do with his conception of socialism.

Rethinking Marxism .

Launched in 1988 by academics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Rethinking Marxism was intended to confront the crisis of the left in the 1980s by literally rethinking Marxism in light not only of the retreat of the left over the 1980s but also of subsequent theoretical innovations beyond Marxism.

Science and Society .

Launched in 1936 by left intellectuals close to or affiliated with the American Communist Party, Science and Society has nevertheless maintained itself as an independent and non-sectarian vehicle for debate on the Marxist left.

Socialism and Democracy .

Launched in 1985 by academics and activists linked to the City University of New York, the initial editorial of Socialism and Democracy framed its future orientation to act as an arena of debate around a dual problematic: if modernization was to mean developing society as a whole then it needed to be through some form of socialism; while socialism and democracy are best understood not as alternatives but rather as two aspects of the same thing.

Socialist Register .

Launched in 1964 on the basis of disagreements about the orientation of New Left Review , Socialist Register saw itself as continuing the socialist humanism associated with the New Reasoner tradition of the original New Left Review synthesis. It is an annual whose center of gravity has moved from England to Canada and the USA.

Studies in Marxism .

Launched in 1993, Studies in Marxism is the in-house journal of the Marxism Specialist Group of the British Political Studies Association.

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Critical Theory, The Welfare State, and Neo-liberalism

• First Online: 07 September 2022

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• Brian Caterino 2  

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The welfare state arose in response to the side effects of a capitalist economy which creates both social and economic dislocation. Some thinkers believe that the welfare state is simply a tool to manage and contain the protest potentials that arise in the wake of these problems. Others see a positive function in the welfare state. It can uncouple basic needs from the market and thus decommodify them. They also recognize social rights. The Frankfurt school embodies both trends. Neo-liberalism however aims to dismantle the welfare state and reinstate a free market which ends the “dependency” on welfare. However, understanding both the welfare state and the neo-liberal alternative requires a notion of social power that mainstream pluralism and neo-liberalism suppressed.

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Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: Americas Enduring Confrontation with Poverty 2nd edition (New York: Oxford, 2013).

Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

On the Frankfurt School see Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations” 71-94 and Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State”: 95-117 both in Andrew Arato and Eike Gephardt Editors The Essential Frankfurt School Reader New edition (London: Bloomsbury Academic 1982); Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

On Neumann see William Scheuermann Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and The Rule of Law (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996); David Kettler and Thomas Wheatland, Learning from Franz L. Neumann: Law, Theory and the Brute Facts of Political Life (Anthem Press , 2019 ); William Scheuerman ed., The Rule of Law Under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); Fred Block and Margaret Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique ( Cambridge MA: Harvard, 2014). Nancy Fraser identifies a third dimension in Polanyi, Nancy Fraser, “A Triple Movement: Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi” NLR 81, (May/June, 2013): 119-32.

T H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class And Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950),

Gasta-Esping Andersen, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990): 37

Andersen, Three Worlds : 45

Andersen, Three Worlds :

For example, see Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975)

Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser. Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003).

Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” The American Political Science Review Vol. 56, No. 4 (Dec. 1962), pp. 947-952; Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Decisions and Nondecisions: An Analytical Framework,” The American Political Science Review Vol. 57, No. 3 (Sep. 1963), pp. 632-642.

Matthew Crenshaw, The Unpolitics of Air Pollution: A Study of Non-Decision Making in the Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1971) was an attempt to illustrate the notion of non-decision making in the context of local deliberations over air pollution.

Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View second ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan Springer. 2005): 28

John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence & Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982).

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980): 131. He used the term regime of Disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison ( New York: Vintage, 1978). For a critical discussion that bears on my account, see Charles Taylor. “Foucault on Freedom and Truth” Political Theory 12, no. 2 (1984): 152–83. http://www.jstor.org/stable/191359 .

I think this is a limit in Sanford Schram’s otherwise informative discussion of discourse of poverty in Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance and Globalization ( Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

John Keane, “Introduction” to Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (London: Routledge, 1984): 11-32.

On Ordo Liberalism see Werner Bonefeld, “German Ordo-Liberalism and the politics of vitality” Renewal 20.4 (2013). Also Bonefeld, Strong State Free Economy (Lantham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017); Michel Foucault also discussed Ordo Liberalism in Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France (1978–9 ) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Among many analyses of neo-liberalism see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism (New York: Oxford, 2007); Thomas Biebriche, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019; Wolfgang Streeck , Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism 2nd Edition (London: Verso, 2015).

Daniel Steadman-Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985)

See for example Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: Americas Enduring Confrontation with Poverty 2 nd edition (New York: Oxford, 2013).

Loic Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009a). Also, Wacquant. Punishing the Poor: The Neo-Liberal government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009b).

Joe Soss, Sanford Schram and Richard Fording, “Governing the Poor: The Rise of the Neoliberal Paternalist State.” This is drawn from their book Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago University of Chicago Press 2011) also see Schram, “Neoliberalizing the Welfare State: Marketizing Social Policy/ Disciplining Clients” in Damien Cahill, Melinda Cooper, Martin Konings and David Primrose, Sage Handbook of Neoliberalism (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publishing, 2018): 308-322

Jamie Peck, “Austerity urbanism: American cities under extreme economy” City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action vol 16, no 6 626-55: 644

A different version of this point was made by Richard Sennett who emphasized the socialization of actors to accept the flexible fast capitalism in which they have to be able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, See The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven: Yale, 2006). He draws on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity, 2000).

See Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003) :301

Angela M. Eikenberry and Jodie Drapal Kluver, “The Marketization of the Nonprofit Sector: Civil Society at Risk?” Public Administration Review Vol. 64, No. 2 Mar.—Apr. (2004): 132-140.

William P. Ryan, “The New Landscape for Non-Profits” Harvard Business Review 77, 1 (1999): 127-36.

Max Horkheimer. “The End of Reason” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader: 26-47; Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974).

Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon, 1979).

Peter Taylor-Gooby, Reframing Social Citizenship (New York: Oxford, 2009): 3.

David Garland, The Welfare State A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016): 126-7.

Garland, The Welfare State: 125

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Caterino, B. (2022). Critical Theory, The Welfare State, and Neo-liberalism. In: The Failure of the Neo-Liberal Approach to Poverty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10606-4_2

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Marxist Theory on Poverty

Introduction to marxist theory on poverty, reasons for poverty.

Reasons for poverty and social exclusion can come from a variety of theoretical approaches including anti-racist, postmodern and religious approaches. In this article, I am going to analyse the key sociological perspective of Marxism and the Marxist Theory of poverty based on class.

Marxist Theory of Poverty

The sociological perspective of karl marx.

Karl Marx focused his search for the basic principles of history on the economic environments in which societies develop. Karl Marx believed that society is divided into those who own the means of producing wealth and those who do not, giving rise to class conflict. Dialectical materialism is Marx’s theory that development depends on the clash of contradictions and the creation of new, more advanced structures out of these clashes.

Marxist Theory maintains that poverty, like wealth, is an inevitable consequence of a capitalist society. Marxists argue that poverty benefits the ruling class, as it ensures that there is always a workforce willing to accept low wages.  Similarly, the existence of unemployment and job insecurity means that there is always a ‘reserve army of labour’ able and willing (or, unable to be unwilling!) to take their place if they are not happy.  Capitalism and the bourgeoisie therefore benefit from the existence of poverty (Cunningham, 2007).  It is not simply that there are rich and poor.  It is rather that some are rich because some are poor (Kincaid, 1973).

For Marxists then, poverty is an intrinsic and integral feature of capitalist society, which is a direct consequence of the inequality inherent in the class system.  Until the bourgeoisie are overthrown by the proletariat and the capitalist system is replaced by an egalitarian socialist system, there will always be poverty, irrespective of any half-hearted attempts to alleviate it by the welfare state (Cunningham, 2007).

Marxists then, clearly locate the source of poverty in the structural nature of society; they identify the welfare system as an instrument of the state, which acts to maintain gross inequalities of wealth that see some people living in dire destitution with little chance of ever really escaping from it. All from Chapter 2: Poverty and Social work service user Cunningham 2007, Learning matters.

A Critique of Marxist Theory of Poverty

With reference to social work practice and policy.

If poverty can only be ended by the replacement of a capitalist system by a socialist one, how then, do Marxists explain the existence of welfare institutions including social services departments that are designed to assist the poor and eradicate poverty?  Jones and Novak (1999) note that it is essential for capitalism that poverty is maintained and managed, hence welfare benefits like the rest of the welfare state, are not designed to assist people out of poverty.  Rather the welfare state is a palliative, or partial cure that it is there to ease the worse affects of capitalism, whilst ensuring that social harmony and the status quo is maintained.

Social work is regarded as an instrument of the state, which further exists to maintain the status quo.  Social workers help people to adjust to their difficulties, by providing services, or a listening ear; and in doing so, structural problems become individualised with attention shifted away from the real cause.  In this sense, poverty is maintained as poor people internalise their own failings, are partially soothed by the help being provided, and any revolutionary threat arising out of discontentment is negated.

Becker is very critical of the role of social workers in understanding and influencing state politics on poverty.  Becker argues that social workers have little understanding of the complex processes that generate and maintain poverty; they have limited insight into how their political and welfare ideologies and attitudes to poverty affect their daily practice with poor people; they have failed to place poverty on the agenda for social work theorising, education, policy and practice. (Becker, 1997, p.114)

This links in with the ongoing debate “between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, between ‘copers’ and ‘non-copers’, and so on” (Becker, 1997, p116). Becker suggests that most social workers believe they can have little strategic impact on poverty itself and believe therefore, that they should intervene with individuals rather than on a structural level (Becker, 1997. p116).

Many social workers want to intervene to bring about change, but placements (often those in statutory social services) tend to find their initial ideas constrained by cultures in organisations which are mostly based upon the ideological premise that change is not possible at a structural level.  Research by other academics backs this up (see for example, Jones, 2001), but it is our view that bringing about change in social work, is always possible, however small and however insignificant it may at first seem.

Task centred practice could be used to work with service users who are in poverty, in very practical ways (see for example, Doel and Marsh 1992; Reid and Shyne, 1969).  Service users have often been critical of social workers for failing to help them with practical problems, such as those of debt, housing difficulties, and other ‘problems of living’.  Task centred practice offers a very practical model which is potentially very empowering to service users as it is they who choose which areas they wish to work on.  Task centred practice is based on the premise that the service user will work in partnership with the social worker and learn new methods of problem solving which will equip them in the future.

In this sense, workers could adopt a very practical way to address some aspects of poverty.  However, perhaps this still doesn’t go far enough, as this method of practice is based upon an individualised approach and doesn’t address the bigger picture.   Possibly by combining task centred working with other more radical methods of working might address this.

I am interested to hear your thoughts, so please leave your comments below.

You might also like to read about the four noble truths and eightfold path in Buddhism.

7 thoughts on “Marxist Theory on Poverty”

GOD’s existance is not debatable

ummmmm yer it is haha

So what happened to socialist China and why is the class struggle popping in that country?

in the case of China, socialism wasn’t exactly what it was theorized to be. Characteristics were changed and the focus wasn’t on equality. So one can’t call that true socialism.

• Pingback: Reflective learning from lived experience - EMPT London

I also strongly support the persepective that poverty is an intrisic and intergral feature in the capitalist society . This is also evident in the contemporary economy especially for developing and less developed countries such as Somalia and other developing countries such as Zimbabwe and Mozambique

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Is ‘cultural Marxism’ a conspiracy theory or a threat to democracy?

Ted cruz said the student protests are a result of ‘cultural marxism.’ what does that mean.

By Jennifer Graham

Student protests at universities across the U.S. are ostensibly related to the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 and Israel’s military response. But there’s something else that’s being blamed for the uprisings: cultural Marxism.

Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox earlier this week, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz blamed cultural Marxism directly, without offering a definition. In a previous appearance on Fox, he explained that this system of belief divides the world into two groups — oppressors and victims — and that student protesters see Palestinians as the victims oppressed by Israel.

Cruz is likely talking up cultural Marxism because he published a book on that theme last year. But he’s not the only person on the political right to link campus unrest to this ideology, or to warn of its dangers in recent years.

A 2022 report from the Heritage Foundation said that cultural Marxism poses a “far more serious and existential threat to the United States than did Soviet communism.” Jordan Peterson has spoken about it, as have other thought leaders on the right.

Those on the left, however, call this idea balderdash, “ the newest intellectual bugaboo on the radical right ,” as an article published in the magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center put it.

It’s actually not that new — Pat Buchanan was using the term in his presidential campaign in the year 2000. But cultural Marxism has risen to the fore again, in part because Columbia University — the epicenter of the student protests — has a history of affiliation with Marxist thought. And while some on the left have dismissed the concept of cultural Marxism as a “far-right conspiracy theory,” there are, in fact, advocates of Marxism teaching in American universities, and the number of young adults who prefer socialism and Marxism to capitalism is on the rise.

Here’s a short primer on why the controversial German philosopher, born 206 years ago this week, is coming up in connection with campus protests in 2024.

When was the Frankfurt School at Columbia University?

Prior to World War II, a group of German scholars focused on neo-Marxist theory became collectively known as the Frankfurt School. According to an overview published by ThoughtCo ., “It was not a school, in the physical sense, but rather a school of thought associated with scholars at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany.”

After Adolph Hitler came to power, the scholars moved their base camp to Columbia University, where it resided from 1934 to 1949, the New Republic explained in an article entitled “ Frankfurt on the Hudson .” The scholarship most associated with this group of intellectuals is Critical Theory, which examines oppression and inequality in social structures, and the role of media and culture in shaping society; it is the ideological ancestor of Critical Race Theory , a recent front in the culture wars.

As described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , the Frankfurt School scholars “revised and updated Marxism by integrating it with the work of Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Friedrich Nietzsche while developing a model of radical critique that is immanently anchored in social reality. They used this model to analyze a wide range of phenomena — from authoritarianism as a political formation and as it manifests in both the nuclear family and deep-seated psychological dispositions, to the effects of capitalism on psychological, social, cultural, and political formations as well as on the production of knowledge itself.”

The fact that many of these scholars were Jewish contributes to arguments that opposition to cultural Marxism is antisemitic, as an article by Bill Berkowitz in Intelligence Report, the magazine of the Southern Law Poverty Center, claims.

Berkowitz writes: “Right-wing ideologues, racists and other extremists have jazzed up political correctness and repackaged it — in its most virulent form, as an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers. These supposed originators of ‘cultural Marxism’ are seen as conspiratorial plotters intent on making Americans feel guilty and thus subverting their Christian culture.”

But in political discourse on the right, the term has largely been divorced from its complex history and instead is being used to more broadly condemn “wokeness” and any progressive cause, especially those that focus on economic or social inequality.

And of course, when it comes to the student protests, the people crying “cultural Marxism” are defenders, not critics, of Israel and the Jewish people.

What does ‘cultural Marxism’ mean?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the first known use of the term cultural Marxism dates to 1938, when it was then described in the British Union Quarterly as “the preliminary bolshevisation of the mind, facilitated by the indiscriminate toleration-psychosis of liberalism, inherent in Social-Democracy, and leading to its final inevitable collapse.”

It has since been used by the political right to describe “a political agenda advocating radical social reform, said to be promoted within western cultural institutions by liberal or left-wing ideologues intent on eroding traditional social values and imposing a dogmatic form of progressivism on society,” according to the Oxford Dictionary.

The antisemitism on college campuses is utterly disgusting. It is a direct result of the sickness of Cultural Marxism that has seized control of colleges. Every violent rioter should be expelled, arrested, and—if they are not a citizen—deported. pic.twitter.com/XtYVAIPyED — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 2, 2024

In a 2018 article on the topic in The Hedgehog Review , Andrew Lynn noted that cultural Marxism is “centered in the academy” and is “said to hold sway over the professoriate in humanities and social science departments.” Their students are then sent forth into the world to proselytize Marxist cultural principles, which rose up to replace Marxist economic principles after their failure.

Marxism on campus

How many American professors are actually Marxists? Forbes reported that one estimate puts the number at 3%, although those who generally embrace Marxist or Democratic Socialist views are likely higher, and Marxist-leaning professors outnumber conservatives in some disciplines, like social science.

As Reason’s Robby Soave wrote in “Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump,” published in 2019, “Most people know that professors are more left-leaning than the average American: what they might not realize is that so many professors teach from an explicitly Marxist perspective or at the very least apply critical theory to the subject they teach.”

As for the general public, the rise in young adults expressing support for Marxism is “disquieting,” according to the Acton Institute, which in 2020 reported on a five-fold increase in just one year, saying “nearly one-third of the members of Gen Z — Americans between the ages of 16 and 23 — deem ‘Marxism’ worthy of support. The term’s favorability has skyrocketed to 30% among Gen Z respondents, up from 6% in 2019.”

The same survey found that 49% of Gen Z approved of socialism, compared to 40% the year prior.

More recently, in 2022, Pew Research Center found shrinking support for socialism among all Americans, but noted a sharp generational divide: “While younger adults are more likely than older adults to say they have positive impressions of socialism, the opposite is true for capitalism. Just 40% of those ages 18 to 29 view capitalism positively; that is the lowest share in any age group and 33 percentage points lower than the share of those 65 and older.”

There is also a pronounced generational divide when it comes to Americans’ feelings about Israel and Palestine. In multiple surveys, young adults are more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. And notably, according to a report in The Washington Post, “Fourteen percent of 18- to 29-year-olds thought it was ‘very important’ for the United States to protect Israel compared with two-thirds of those 65 or older.” The same article, written by Frances Vinall, noted that one explanation for young Americans’ support of Palestine is their tendency to see the conflict “through a racial justice lens.”

Vinall quoted Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, who said many college students see the war as “a people of color — that is, the Palestinians — rising up against a white oppressor.”

In other words, Cruz wasn’t wrong to note a thread of cultural Marxism leading to the uprisings, which have led to the arrests of more than 2,000 people across the United States.

Nor was his argument hurt when social media sleuths discovered that one protester and Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University was interested in “theories of the imagination & poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens.”