“Post-Industrial Society” and the Welfare State

“Post-Industrial Society” and the Welfare State

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels described “conservative, or bourgeois, socialism.”

A part of the bourgeoisie [they wrote] wants to remedy social grievances in order to ensure the stability of bourgeois society. . . . They want to have the existing society, but without the revolutionary, transforming elements.

The function of this “socialism,” they went on to say, was not

the abolition of bourgeois relations of production, which is possible only in a revolutionary way, but administrative improvements, which can go forward on the basis of this mode of production, which thus alter nothing in the relationship of capital and labor, ...