Welfare for a Humane Future - David Matthews, Howard Waitzkin

Welfare for people in need always contains profound contradictions. Under capitalism, the welfare state reinforces exploitation and discrimination, yet working people have fought for welfare, which protects against the worst excesses of capitalism. Given the important benefits that welfare can provide, we need to consider the components of a post-capitalist welfare system, one that actually meets the needs of working people. A post-capitalist welfare system puts into practice the values of love, care, solidarity, and cooperation. Such principles are incompatible with the values of racial capitalism. So we work for a post-capitalist alternative. We trace the emphasis on love as a source of revolutionary motivation to key works by Karl Marx, Che Guevara, leaders of Back Lives Matter, and others trying to move beyond racial capitalism. A transformed welfare system depends on communities whose collective values nurture care and wellbeing. Communal institutions that provide welfare services are key. We analyse the eventual failures of historical utopian communities and also some strengths and limitations of communal institutions that have implemented welfare systems in ''actually existing'' socialist countries. A transformation of values depends on a bottom-up aspiration, not imposed by a state apparatus. We examine three examples of communal governance linked to development of post-capitalist welfare systems: the Rojava revolution in northern Syria, the Bolivarian revolutionary p
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