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Protestation
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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That contradicts most of 20th century history. The welfare state was implemented because of Capitalism's failures during the great depression. After the stock market crash in the late 1920's, so many people were left out of work, that the government needed to step in and not only start providing people with guaranteed employment, but also subsidize those that couldn't be employed. This was also when they implemented social security and began implementing universal healthcare systems to pay for people's medical care.
This was largely paid for by historically high taxes on the very same people that caused the financial crisis in the first place.
Capitalists have never approved of these programs. They were forced to provide for people who weren't working. To them, that's the equivalent of theft. It's the entire reason they have been trying so hard to dismantle the welfare state, ever since...and abolish the tax system that funds it. As far as they're concerned, if you can't afford to pay for these services at market value, you deserve to starve and/or die untreated.
Not quite. Capitalists agreed to make temporary concessions, with the dissolution of the USSR there was no longer a rival system that offered good safety nets with fewer resources and under constant siege. Then, the capitalists removed them over time. See here:
For capitalists, welfare comes from taxation, which as paid from the social fund this includes coming from worker's wages. Welfare is merely like electricity for a capitalist, both necessary in that they maintain the conditions for commodity production, and as such both are minimized to the degree they can be, just like worker's wages.
Was the USSR really the "threat of a good example", as opposed to Europe and Scandinavia?
Yes, absolutely. For starters, post WWI, Europe was in dire straits. A lot of the allied powers were desparate to pay back the inter-ally debts they owed to the US, the rising imperial power at the time, and these countries in turn charged Germany massive reparations. This indirectly assisted in fascism coming to power in Germany, along with a need to kill the communists organizing all over Europe to follow in the footsteps of the Russians. The Nazis were an effective anti-KPD kill force.
In fact, the social safety nets that Europe has now were in large part a direct response to increasing communist sympathies and risk of revolution. The soviets had massively expanded safety nets, and workers were sympathetic. Another thing to note is that Europe was imperialist (still is), World War I was more about deciding where colonial lines would be redrawn than anything else. This imperialism is what funded US and western European safety nets while maintaining capitalist profits, the soviets funded their safety nets through their own labor.
I recommend reading Concessions.