PARADED as amongst the greatest achievements of ‘advanced’ capitalist countries in the post-World War II period, the welfare state epitomised an era of widespread social prosperity.
The mass of people in Western Europe, North America, and Australasia was largely guaranteed public education, healthcare, water, electricity, and other material needs. Working-age populations either found work in bustling manufacturing industries or received significant unemployment benefits. The anti-communist US ideologue, Walt Rostow, boasted that the ‘West’ had successfully entered the age of high mass consumption.
Today, as mass protests rock France, the welfare state can officially be pronounced dead. The convulsions were triggered by high school and university students demanding accountability for the rapidly deteriorating and underfunded education sector. The demise extends to all spheres of life, and to all parts of the so-called developed world.
The welfare state itself was not a gift from above but a compulsion forced upon ruling classes of Western countries petrified of working-class populations at home and colonised people demanding self-rule in Asia and Africa. The fear was that the masses would be taken in by the irrepressible appeal of Soviet, and later, Chinese socialism. Seen thus, the welfare state represented a historic compromise between capital and labour. The former accepted regulation of profits, progressive taxation, and limits on its political power; the latter took on the role of an empowered citizenry that would eschew revolutionary politics.
It is no surprise that the unravelling of this capital-labour compact coincided to a significant extent with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The balance of class forces within Western societies had already started to shift with the emergence of what later became known as neoliberalism in the late 1970s, but the die was cast by the end of actually existing socialism.
The demise extends to all spheres.
It has been a slow death, because welfare apparatuses do not disappear overnight; neither do people’s expectations of the state. Indeed, what is happening in France today is itself a reflection that the mass of the people deeply imbibed ideas of citizenship during the era of welfarism. Compared to our society, students, workers, and other social forces in countries like France are still well-organised and possess the ability and will to rock the system.
Nevertheless, the unleashing of neoliberal capital and the attendant rollback of public funding in health, education, and other public infrastructure have had devastating effects. Stagnating real incomes, growing inequality, and an overall decline in social well-being have been feasted on by hate-mongering right-wing forces, while entities like the British Labour Party and French Socialist Party have totally abandoned the left project.
The shameful retreat of social democratic parties aside, the welfare state will not return because the historical conjuncture that spawned it is over. The reconstruction of war-ravaged Britain and France from the late 1940s was funded by Washington through the so-called Marshall Plan; post-Nazi West Germany was also given an economic foothold in world trade because of US largesse. The US empire is no longer willing to prop up Europe; it is also drastically cutting aid to the so-called developing world.
It’s worth being reminded that the zenith of the welfare state in ‘advanced’ capitalist countries was coeval with either aid dependency, violent coups, or imperialist wars in the erstwhile Third World. Think Pakistan under Ayub Khan, or Vietnam, the Congo and Chile.
A few Third World countries broke with the dominant trend, notably the East Asian ‘developmental state’. Some, like South Korea, benefited from being central to Washington’s Cold War designs, their infant industries given preferential access to the US market. But state apparatuses were authoritarian, and there were fewer concessions made to labouring classes by capitalist interests in comparison to the Western prototype.
We in Pakistan have never really had a welfarist interregnum. When socialism was a mass ideology in the 1960s and 1970s, governing regimes adopted a few tangible policies like land reforms and nationalisation. But the state remained colonial in its orientation and was never fully subdued to the public interest.
Today, like many of its counterparts, the Pakistani state couldn’t care less about the masses’ welfare.
Profit and repression are its only concerns. When mass protests do erupt, structural change remains elusive. A new era of mass prosperity to transcend the historical inheritance of the capitalist world system requires both ideology and organisation. Only then can we force the state and capital into retreat.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, October 23rd, 2026
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