Feminism beyond welfare: care, socialisation and the politics of the state

Abstract

Feminism has long been concerned with the role of the state in facilitating the oppression of women on the one hand and mitigating this oppression on the other. Though much has been written on the function, effects and possibilities of the liberal welfare state, the same volume of study has not been devoted to more positive proposals about the role of the state as such. Discussion of positive proposals for state politics has not been entirely absent, but the discourse in feminist theory has been disproportionately focused on the critique of the liberal welfare state as an instrument of gender and family enforcement (i.e. social control) or, alternatively, on a defence of the welfare state, even with its potentially repressive dynamics, against right-wing austerity measures. In this article, these two views of the welfare state are examined through, first, socialist feminist critiques and, second, the criticism of and proposals for welfare by feminist care ethicists. I juxtapose these positions to show how debates about the welfare state are shaped by unspoken and potentially self-undermining assumptions about state power, planned economies and state provision. As an alternative, I counterpose the understudied thought of Marxist feminist Alexandra Kollontai, and, specifically, her model of universal state provision and the socialisation of care. I argue that Kollontai's account of the socialisation of care resolves not only the criticisms directed at capitalist welfare states but also those which have deterred feminist consideration of state planning as a means of gender liberation.