Social Security Merely Pacifies the Proletariat
Victor Shammas and Tony Sandset 2-12-2020, Victor Shammas Head of Department and Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of Agder, Norway Tony Sandset is Research Fellow in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo, Norway "Reproduction and the Welfare State: Notes on Norwegian Biopolitics," Nordic Journal of Social Research, https://www.idunn.no/doi/full/10.7577/njsr.3244
In Capital, proposed that biological reproduction remains a fundamental political problem of capitalism: ‘The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power’ (p. 275). Without the biological reproduction of working populations, there can be no social reproduction, which maintains and upholds the legitimacy of the capitalist economic order. Enlightened capitalists, therefore, have a self-interested stake in ensuring that workers are housed, clothed and fed and have a minimal level of satisfaction, so they continue to replenish the human stock capitalism uses in the processes of production and accumulation. More specifically, capitalism requires a biopolitics capable of supplying factories, warehouses, office towers and more with a steady flow of fresh, docile labour. The specifically social-democratic variation of this theory postulates that the welfare state demands replenishment of the population not merely through labour power—though this is included—but also through taxpayers and, more broadly, ‘prosocial’ citizens willing and able to enter into the relationships of mutuality that undergird universalist welfarism.