Abstract
The book surveys the social policy landscape in the past decade. It sounds the alarm at the growth of ‘corpocracy’ (the dominance of corporate interests over the political and media discourse and their seeping into state structures), at the private takeover of public services and at the dismantling of safety nets and of democratic decision making. Although it focuses on the United States, it provides a general critique of current social policies predicated on neoliberal economics. It overviews a panorama of rising inequality and budget and tax cuts, where unionised labour has collapsed and swathes of the population are impoverished. High unemployment and welfare entitlement restrictions shrink the numbers of those classed as ‘deserving poor’, act as downward pressures on wages and swell up the ranks of the ‘working poor’.
The Assault on Social Policy is divided into chapters that cover areas of intervention (welfare reform; social security; health; education) as well as significant actors or recipients (corporations; disabled people; children; ‘outsiders’). It examines these in the context of the needs of globalised capital and the redistribution of power and resources that has occurred in favour of the ‘haves’ over the ‘have-nots’ in particular since the 2008 recession. The US realities not only remind us of the permeability of policy across borders, but also function as a warning about the shape of further things to come in other developed countries. For example, the ‘corpocratic’ impact on health, education, welfare or criminal justice will likely strike a chilly chord with UK readers.
The final chapter explores Roth and Peters’ ambitious ‘hope that this volume will help the less powerful advance constructive and democratic changes in social policy’ (p. 19). However, there is a dearth of robust and grounded suggestions as to how to implement policies that are open to democratic scrutiny and how to achieve that ‘economic justice’ which, as the authors highlight, is prerequisite for social justice. Alternatives are underdeveloped and at times simplistic: e.g. ‘democratic socialism’ can achieve ‘market efficiency’ with the use of ‘computerized economic models’ (p. 194). The authors stick to an unquestioned belief in markets as ‘efficient’ allocators ‘of goods and services’ and ‘made to serve the people and not the other way round’ (p. 43) – they just need to be controlled by the state and civil society. Roth and Peters offer basic social democratic and Keynesian economics prescriptions.
Although hardly revolutionary, their aspirations (e.g. universal health care, support for low income families, redistributive taxation, infrastructure and education investment as a means of reducing unemployment and boosting the economy) appear almost chimerical in the current political and ideological climate. In this sense the book has a progressive feel. The authors provide a sometimes incisive commentary on the state of the American nation and debunk policy myths like the unsustainability of paying for baby boomers’ pensions. However, their prescriptions for how civil society can challenge corporate power are woolly and unfocused. Vague suggestions like ‘study groups, education, collective action by strong unions’; the ‘reforming’ of the ‘helping professions’; ‘community organization, skillful use of power, education, reason, and so on’ are accompanied by rather facile remarks (pp. 188, 193). For example, the chapter on health concludes that changing the corporate domination of medicine ‘may be easier than one might expect’ (p. 140), without having shown how this could be achieved other than by brief references to staff unionisation and patient empowerment. These problems are aggravated by the corpulence of the writing and by a lack of coherent structuring. There are valid and thought-provoking points being made in the book, but they get lost as thoughts are jumbled together; often concepts follow each other without proper linkages and arguments go underdeveloped. The rambling, repetitive style is in dire need of editing, or at the very least some subheadings to break up and clarify the text. (There are exceptions: the chapters on welfare and education are more coherently written.)
I was left puzzled as to the target audience for this book. With its broad, entry-level definitions it feels like an introduction to social policy. This would make it useful for students and lay readers, were it not that its descriptive and theoretical overviews are often not backed by evidence or concrete examples. With its genuinely democratic aspirations it might appeal as a call to arms for campaigners, although it suffers from political naivety. If it is meant for American policy-makers (after all, it bears a Foreword by independent Senator Bernie Sanders), the book may work in assisting the initiated by flinging lots of information at them. However, the references in the last chapter to socialism (albeit ‘democratic’, ‘market socialism’), (re)nationalisation and workers’ control are unlikely to go down well among US mainstream politicians.