We have the neoliberal left around the world already making the social welfare worse. Did you see everybody turning ML or turning to fascism? Politics is complex, making people's lives worse does not lead automatically to revolution.

You should look into reading the book Health Communism, I'm currently working through it, but the argument in so many words presented by the authors is, "Yes", but likely not for the reasons you think.

The "welfare" state is something that arises through the contradiction between capitalism and health itself. Health under capitalism acts as capitalism's host, but because of that fact, health takes on the important characteristic as capitalism's key vulnerability. In order for there to be productivity, capitalism needs to identify and maintain productive bodies, and in the same breath, claims that doing so is in no way a requirement under capitalism. This contradiction explains why health systems both new and yet-to-be implemented under capitalism are so desperately attacked.

Health, according to the authors, has no fixed meaning; it is fluid. They describe it as a "race/class-stratified matrix" defined by artificial scarcity and negation; non-cancerous, non-disabled, etc. The capitalist definition of health ultimately is one where a person must be productive, normative, and able to buy health. They draw on the works of the Socialist Patient's Collective (SPK), who described "Health" to be a purely ideological ideal, a "biological, fascist fantasy" that conceals the social conditions of illness. The goal of the book is to reclaim the notion of Health from this fantasy, under the concept they call Health Communism.

They argue that Health under capitalism is used to divide populations. Capitalism separates people into deserving and undeserving lots. Separate workers from the "surplus" (those who have been biologically certified unfit to work). This surplus population then becomes marked for "extractive abandonment", then framed as eugenic or debt burdens to gut and block reforms. They argue that to abolish capitalism, we must shatter the worker/surplus binary, and center the surplus population in our struggle. Health Communism then becomes a goal where people are not simply provided the care they need (since, "need" is often decided by the welfare state), to all care for all people. It must go beyond equitable redistribution or state-provided "socialized medicine" inside of capitalism. They argue for an internationalist, anti-austerity, anti-border, approach that demands a radical abundance of care.

As others have pointed out, socialized medicine within capitalism is insufficient. The NHS, Canadian Medicare, etc. remain capitalist and imperialist systems. They do not exist as "islands of socialism" within capitalism. For this reason, they state that Medicare for All is not enough by itself and that health insurance companies are not in the business of providing care but instead simply financial risk-management institutions with no place in society.

They go on to define health as broader than simply healthcare. Housing, clean air, water, sanitation, social supports, in-home aid, and a livable planet are all healthcare, alongside traditional care. These European-style social democracies are the shining example of the limitations of healthcare under capitalism. They support themselves through imperialism, gatekeep care through the debt/waste frame, divide the proletariate into "productive" and "unproductive" masses, and use these tools of clasification as means of labor discipline. The threat of becoming "unproductive" looms over us all.

There have been countless stories in the past few years that highlight these points. In the UK, Jodey Whiting was housebound with chronic pain when the DWP judged her "fit to work" and stopped her benefits; she took her life two weeks later, and a coroner ruled the wrongful withdrawal was "the trigger." Errol Graham starved to death eight months after his disability benefits were stopped. Philippa Day was found dead with a letter beside her refusing her a home assessment visit. Laura Winham lay dead in her flat for three years after her benefits were cut off. Academic research has linked the work capability assessment to 590 suicides in a single three-year period. These are not anomalies. They are the predictable output of a system that recertifies the surplus as "capable" to make good on its promise to eliminate "waste" and cut down on "debt". The "waste" that they eliminate, quite literally, are people.

The current incarnation of healthcare under capitalism is obviously insufficient. We should not be championing its destruction, by following the lead of rightists hellbent on subsuming the entire system into private hands. However, I also cannot say that the system that should replace it would look anything like the systems that exist today. We're talking about a system where people simply get cared for; no questions asked, no qualifications necessary, no need to be certified as needing that care. We need a more radical demand, one where "we are not basing the value of human life on one's willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy."

Acceleration leads to nothing good and typically working-class people of all types do not.. favor such language. It just sounds like wanting the world to burn to them. But practically, it's an excuse to not actually perform political exposure, agitation, and propagation.

The welfare state is a concession of class harmony born out of the THREAT of revolution.

The job of communists today is to highlight its feeble nature and the eager which bourgeois democracy will cast it aside once the workers are no longer a political active force. People in the imperial core are more than willing to let the global south die for these concessions, so appealing to their humanity as the first vector of dismantling the cultural hegemony is a lost cause. And telling them you are going to take away their treats is even worse.

Anti-imperialism is integral and cannot be left in the dust. At first making them aware that the gains of their forebears are not to last and cannot be regained in a permanent form, and that the ruling classes give them only crumbs of the surplus value they produce and therefore imperialism is not necessary for adequate conditions (the GDR did not need neocolonies or economic domination to give its populace a normal standard of life) - solidarity with the free peoples of this world will grow out from these seeds planted.

We should attack the welfare states by revealing them as the imperialist farces they are. But we should at all times defend the material rights of workers, including existing welfare benefits, and fight to extend them. The political system of waning social democracy should be critiqued to be replaced by something better, while extending workers rights in ways the bourgeoisie would never concede to. The problem today is that parts of the so-called left in social imperialist countries end up campaigning on merely continuing social democracy, which is not only insufficient but also economically unrealistic and unachievable in our time. It's not the 60s anymore. If they gradually gain power in parliament they start to realize this and begin to transform their politics from social fascism to petite bourgeois fascism.

doesnt welfare state as we know it today basically prevent revolution. communism is unpopular in northern europe, japan etc. because nobody cares for strugle and fighting when you have it relatively well. this is why mamdami is not good, we dont need you to be comfortable in your imperialist nations...

No. We should fight for the dismantling of the bourgeois state. That is something very different than fighting against the welfare state. Losurdo is right. Fighting for the rights of workers is an integral part of the struggle to build class consciousness and to develop a revolutionary movement.

This does not however mean voting for bourgeois parties just because they promise welfare state concessions. Building an independent socialist political movement that does not subordinate itself to bourgeois liberalism is not mutually exclusive with continuing to advocate for the protection and expansion of worker rights and social welfare.

At any given time we should always push for more than what the most "progressive" bourgeois party is offering. This is what sharpens the contradiction and exposes the bourgeoisie's pretense of progressivism. We have to force the liberals to expose themselves as the ones who are standing in the way of workers' rights and social justice.

How will you, as a revolutionary vanguard, win the trust of the working class otherwise if they do not see you as their strongest and most determined champion in their struggle for economic and social justice? Why would workers trust you if you are actively trying to make their lives worse and take away their hard won rights and social safety nets?

Lenin had quite a lot to say on this subject. If you have not watched it yet, i highly recommend listening to this video on "What Is To Be Done" and its criticism of economisim because it addresses in part exactly these sorts of topics.

No. that sounds like an accelerationist idea. The bourgeoisie will do austerity on their own we don't need to waste our effort helping them. Our job is raising class consciousness to match their immiseration of the working classes and we are not keeping pace as is.

Should we fight to keep welfare systems in place? not really. We should speak out against its destruction as a symptomatic part of the capitalist plan to strip workers of all right to a decent life. We should join movements fighting to save welfare systems in order to raise class consciousness by highlighting the systemic nature of their fight. Exposing the bigger picture makes people more revolutionary.

Yes, as it is now. But you have to replace it with something better. You're not anti-welfare but to develop public organisations not beholden to market conditions and not beholden to the capitalist state either. Another way to put it is that we need to counter the left-liberal notion of the welfare state by offering our own, and decoupling the former from the capitalist state while at the same time not speedrunning those offerings through the private sector. A public sector that is not beholden to capital - either at the capitalist state level or the private sector level.

How is the big question though. Because the above will also need to then inevitably solve both food production and currency production (ie you need tokens to represent labour).

The contradiction to solve for western communists is this: the welfare state is subsidised through the unequal exchange of imperialism (eg the New Deal effectively heightened the brutality of imperialism - Jakarta Method as a more famous example), it also materially provides the structures to ideologically increase the divided between western workers and global south workers, effectively dissolving that international solidarity.

However, history also suggests that western workers on a whole turn towards more overt* fascism when precarity is turned up ie to steal more violently the remaining piece of the surplus value pie. You therefore need an effective vanguard to combat this but that vanguard also needs to offer something in the short term material benefit; you cannot rely on the hope of "empathy".

In the US red power movements and new afrikan movements have ideas (I will have to research this more deeply, ie beyond what the likes of what Black Panther have done) on how to do this but they are effectively quite disorganised as whole after decades (if not centuries depending on how you want to define the movements) of brutal state suppression - the current prison system and police system is largely built on the foundations of kneecapping these most revolutionary of US folks.

So short answer is Losurdo is right but not from a left-liberal perspective. You can't say "no welfare state" and then not offer something that is (1) significantly better (2) feasible. It requires careful creative and thoughtful collaboration to solve this.

(This ain't pie-in-the sky by the way. I just don't personally have a solution for the west. If you look at the global south, things like the Kumbasahree network in India (a capitalist state) is a partial example of this but it required a more local state capture to embolden it. Western communists on the whole should collaborate more with global south communists - you're not going to build actual international solidarity without it - but people get upset when questioned why the likes of PSL effectively refuse to touch these pertinent questions. They have no answer to the question of labour aristocracy)

*there has to be a better way for me to articulate this (but I don't have the mental fortitude or skill at present to convey this at present. I'm too fucking tired). Because fascism isn't a WWII-esque phenomenon. It has been there since the birth of capitalism: https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/

"Should we do an accelerationism?" and other deep quandries of the left.

No.

As much as the welfare state is paid for in part (or in whole) by imperialism, it is a concrete political demand of the working class that was won with a combination of bitter struggle and concessions strategically granted by the capitalists in the wake of the reshaping of the world post ww2. As such it should be fought for, as an expression of the working class's political will and autonomy, not simply sought to be dismantled because under capitalism it is paid for with the blood of the global south.