Abolition and the Welfare State: Implications for Social Welfare

Introduction

“Abolition is not absence, it is presence” (Gilmore, 2018). With these words, Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us that prison abolition is not simply about dismantling harmful state systems; it is as much about building and making present the relations, practices, and structures that we need in a liberatory future. Abolition is not only working towards the absence of oppression, but towards realizing the presence of well-being. The last two decades of contemporary abolitionist organizing have surfaced significant discourses and strategizing about what that presence is or could be.

Abolition had been thrust into public consciousness as U.S. and global uprisings protesting racialized police violence in the summer of 2020 brought sharpened analysis, bolder demands, and new opportunities to win concessions from elected officials and state agents. Since 2020, emergent on-the-ground examples of abolitionist inspired policies and programs­ have become increasingly visible. Struggles both against the carceral state and for transformative shifts as expressed in U.S. campaigns to defund the police and invest in care, choose treatment over trauma, or reject cops for counselors have further defined both the absence and presence of abolition. These abolitionist struggles are supported by a broad movement for abolition, made up of myriad movements and formations including Black Lives Matter, feminist of color anti-violence formations and movements for gender justice, anti-war and anti-imperialist formations, and the movement for immigrant justice.

This article specifically addresses abolitionist presence with a focus on such arenas as health and mental health care, housing, education, childcare, and elder care. In particular, we explore the question of how these provisions related to well-being, much of which fall under the domain of the welfare state, can be addressed by an abolitionist politic and praxis that tends to emphasize the dismantling of policing, prosecution, and prisons—aspects of what is generally referred to as the carceral state—and less on what might constitute presence.

A Brief History of the Welfare State

The term welfare state first appeared in Britain in 1945, as WWII came to an end, and a landslide election ushered the Labour Party into power. During these heady times, the promise of the “abolition of poverty” and the “conquest of unemployment” was palpable although the mechanisms through which they might be achieved were more platitude than concrete policy (Briggs, 1961, p. 221). In fact, the progenitors of the British welfare state as well as those formations emerging through Europe preceded the United States in the forms of poor relief, secularizing social provision away from the church in the UK, and social insurance programs first established in Germany in the nineteenth century to counter the advance of socialism. Building upon nascent frameworks and institutions guiding the UK's establishment of its welfare state, the United States, at state and federal levels, created initial, pre-New Deal social provisions for those (racialized as white, emancipated) individuals seen to be both “deserving” and in most dire need, for example, widows left with no source of income and the poorest class of women with children (Abramovitz, 1988; Gordon, 1994; Katznelson, 2005). Despite what historian Skocpol (1993) notes as a period of generous Civil War public benefits to veterans and widows of fallen soldiers, at times constituting a quarter of federal expenditures from 1880 to 1910, the otherwise halting development of the U.S. welfare system has been decidedly remedial and stigmatizing.

In the United States, the term, welfare state, has not been embraced beyond academic social work, sociology, and political science. However, the notion of welfare, of course, is one that has taken a winding and ignoble path (Abramovitz, 2001). Emblazoned in the first line of the U.S. Constitution, the promotion of the nation's “general Welfare” was foundational to those establishing the nation-state. However, interpretations of the role of the state vis-a-vis the nation's general welfare have been the subject of ongoing and unrelenting debate. The protection of private property was and continues to be seen as the role of the U.S. state and a guarantee of the greatest general welfare for the majority of (white, property-owning) citizens. The realities of profound poverty, unemployment, and lack of basic needs, often a result of capitalist development, prompted a need beyond that managed by family, church, and, eventually, local governmental jurisdictions (Katz, 1988; Quadagno, 1994). The history of the development of the U.S. welfare state is one of the contradictory impulses to sustain market capitalism and manage its deleterious consequences—all while maintaining the tenets and the ongoing sustainability of the former (Abramovitz, 2023; Katznelson, 2005; Piven & Cloward, 1971; Soss et al., 2011).

Grounded in the principle vigorously expressed in the early foundations of the welfare state in the UK—that material provisions to those most in need never exceed the wages of the poorest laborer—the United States followed with an even more constricted version of its welfare state, characterized as the extreme remedial end of the continuum of modern industrial welfare states (Quadagno, 1994; Soss et al., 2011). In his classic treatise, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), Esping-Andersen emphasized the means-tested and stigmatizing nature of the U.S. welfare system as representing an ideal type that Esping-Andersen identified as liberal, not in the sense of a progressive politic but rather in the market-based sense of the word. Juxtaposing it to the generous universal social democratic system of Sweden and other Nordic nations and the conservative, traditional social insurance models of such countries as Germany, the United States represents the welfare state regime that upholds the highest levels of poverty, the greatest economic inequality, and the lowest percentage of governmental material support.

The construction of what we now know as the welfare state in the United States followed in response to the financial crisis of 1929 and the Great Depression (Gordon, 1994; Katz, 1988; Katznelson, 2005). Though relatively egalitarian in its purported goals, the actual implementation of the series of reforms embodied in the New Deal—legislated in enduring if embattled programs such as social security, agricultural assistance, aid to families with children, and public works—were bound not only by ideals of free market individualism but by the profound anti-Black sentiment that continues to imperil even the most modest welfare gains in the United States (Katznelson, 2005; Quadagno, 1994; Soss et al., 2011; Wacquant, 2009). Post-war prosperity in the United States and throughout the industrialized world fueled a period of relative balance between the drive for profits and a limited belief in the common good. In the 1960s, despite persistent conservative attacks, Johnson's War on Poverty and Great Society programs expanded Medicare, Medicaid, housing supports, job training, and food stamps, leading to documented reductions in poverty (Katz, 1986; Soss et al., 2011).

The 1970s marked a new period of U.S. economic decline and the rising rhetoric and political prominence of conservative (often bipartisan) forces, pushing back against Civil Rights and welfare gains with a highly racialized agenda that has successfully mobilized the rapid growth of the carceral state, on the one hand, and the retrenchment of the welfare state, on the other (Garland, 2002; Murakawa, 2014; Soss et al., 2011; Wacquant, 2009). Indeed, just as 1973 marks the punitive turn, marking the beginning of an over five-fold increase in rates of incarceration in the United States, the period of the early 1970s is also characterized by the decline and increasingly punitive nature of an already disciplining system of social welfare provision (Garland, 2002; Wacquant, 2009). These conservative forces, already on the rise, ushered in the U.S. election of Reagan in 1980 (along with Prime Minister Thatcher in Britain in 1979) and the advent of a neoliberal era that vilified poor, Black beneficiaries of public assistance, broke labor union power, dismantled public housing supports, slashed taxes, and set the stage for what would become a hegemonic veneration of private market forces and the demonization of welfare and the “undeserving” racialized poor (Soss et al., 2011; Wacquant, 2009). By the time Clinton reached the U.S. presidency in 1993, the tenacious hold of neoliberalism led this Democratic leader to pass the draconian Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act or Crime Bill of 1994 and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act only two years later.

Functions and Components of the U.S. Welfare State

Public discourse around the term, welfare, and policies established to promote what the U.S. Constitution states as central to the nation, have suffered a level of confusion and rhetorical embattlement that continues to obscure the scope, benefits, limitations, and even—for the greater portion of the U.S. population—the very existence of the welfare state (Abramovitz, 2001; Katz, 1986). In fact, the welfare state in the United States persists as a variegated conglomeration of a patchwork of policies, procedures, programs, agents, and institutions constructed, in large part, to both solve immediate social problems as they arise and to mitigate against the ever-present excesses of U.S. capitalism (Piven & Cloward, 1971; Soss et al., 2011). Despite the unique U.S. failure to grasp the rudiments of what the welfare state is or does, it remains an institutionalized feature, if precariously so, within the contemporary U.S. state.

Garland's (2016) breakdown of what he refers to as “five institutional sectors” (p. 46) offers clarifying categories of the welfare state which helps to explain its beneficiaries and its scope. According to his categorization, the first sector of the welfare state is the provision of social insurance. That is, all citizens of modern states face certain risks—those associated with uncertainty inherent to the variable market forces of capitalism—such as unemployment—and those universal risks that are a part of the human life cycle but that can impede one's capacity to participate in the labor market. These risks include illness, accidents, disability, pregnancy, early child rearing, and old age. Under some interpretations of social insurance, participation in the military and identification as a veteran needing or entitled to certain services can be classified under this category. One function, therefore, of the welfare state is to provide government resources to assist in these situations.

The second sector is social assistance or what is commonly known in the United States as welfare. Though this is not by any means the largest sector of the welfare state, it is that which occupies the largest portion of the public imagination. For example, the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2023) estimated that 8% of the federal budget in 2023 has been slotted for “economic security programs” (para. 8). This politically volatile category of welfare activities includes general assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits, Child Tax Credits, and Supplementary Security Income (SSI). These also include guaranteed income programs that have been the subject of recent political debate and experimental localized pilot programs.

The third sector is made up of publicly-funded social services that constitute age-old public goods proffered by city, county, state-level, and federal levels of government in the form of free or subsidized education, libraries, parks, museums, transportation, childcare, healthcare, legal aid, and other universal goods often subject to budget priorities and restrictions but that have also become a normal expectation of modern governments.

The fourth sector is what Garland (2016) refers to as social work and personal social services. Similar to the category of social assistance, this sector is often subject to means-testing and often performs a particularly disciplining function. Individuals and families that may fall out of what is considered “normal” functioning or that cannot have such needs taken care of within the private domain of one's personal or family care may seek or, alternatively, be identified for welfare support. These forms may be variably subject to stigmatization or pathologizing and range from such services as free or subsidized childcare or care for the elderly to mental health interventions, interventions addressing child abuse or other forms of family violence, or post-incarceration services. Balanced precariously between notions of care and discipline, choice and mandate, family support, and family regulation—this sector is also politically volatile and subject to polarizing discourse.

The final sector is government of the economy or “the operation of large-scale government controls on economic life” (Garland, 2016, p. 50). While this aspect of governance is rarely considered part of welfare state functions, particularly because of its economic focus, Garland argues that the regulation of fiscal and monetary policies, wage and income management, the organization and working conditions of labor, and so on are central to the mitigating of the adverse effects and crises inherent to capitalism and, hence, subject to the necessary management of the welfare state.

Although the sectors of the welfare state most associated with poor racialized classes in the United States prompt the most public and polarizing attention, a review of these various sectors also demonstrates the diverse class interests engaged across sectors. In the United States, as in all welfare state regimes, middle classes also gain from certain activities of the welfare state and specific benefits offered (Abramovitz, 2001). Some of these welfare benefits may be particularly appealing to the middle classes and may be the basis for ongoing middle class support. For example, such programs as mortgage tax credits and social security benefits pegged to income level provide significant material advantages to those in higher income brackets. The wealthy are also recipients not only of universal welfare benefits but of corporate welfare—that is, specific and, in many cases, significant tax benefits, the result of tax policies increasingly weighing in favor of corporations and their highest salaried employees and investors (Abramovitz, 2001). Though public discourse is continuously drawn to welfare benefits for the non-contributing of those considered the “undeserving” poor, these forms of advantage to the middle class and wealthy are often hidden in the minutiae of tax codes or are considered outside the scope of welfare. The era of neoliberalism that vilified the racialized “undeserving” poor also enabled the reorienting of the state from supporting its citizenry towards serving corporations (Abramovitz, 2001, 2012).

Finally, the source of welfare state benefits is not only through direct provision via governmental service delivery but has been largely shifted from the scope of state activity through contracts to non-profit, faith-based, and private agents (Gilmore, 2017; Gordon, 1990). U.S. preference for private enterprise and decades of neoliberal policy has devolved and diminished essential welfare functions of the state to activities driven by profit and empty outcome measures (Soss et al., 2011).

The Disciplining Welfare State

While critiques of the disciplining functions of the welfare state are not new, close examination of the relationship between the carceral state and the welfare state has been surprisingly rare. In 1971, Piven and Cloward argued in Regulating the Poor that the central purpose of welfare had little to do with alleviating poverty and was instead offered to mitigate the danger that poor people posed to economic, social, and political stability. Although these earlier theories of the welfare state were tied to the mitigating effect on the cycles and excesses of capitalism, they were siloed from discussions of what is now known as the carceral state.

Garland, known more for his scholarship on the carceral state, drew early attention to the punitive functions of the welfare state, noting that modern phases of capitalism necessitated variable forms of punishment—in softened forms of amelioration of the carceral state's harshest expression or in regulating forms of care. In 1981, Garland wrote that the policing of individuals, families, and communities was more so governed by agencies of social welfare—social work, education, insurance and child care—than traditional systems of crime and punishment. Although critiques of the disciplining nature of welfare was central to the work of those in the radical social work tradition, direct ties to the punishment of policing and incarceration were largely left out of these conceptions of the welfare state.

Fifty years of neoliberalism along with the rise of the carceral state brought further and more explicit enmeshment between the carceral and welfare states and increased the policing functions of welfare institutions. Inquiry and scholarship from Garland (2002, 2016), Soss et al. (2001),Wacquant (2009, 2010), and Abramovitz (2023), among others, have illuminated the relationship between state punishment and the welfare state, analyzing the growing interconnectedness between these forces. Garland's (2002) theory of Penal Welfarism suggested that prior to the 1970s, penal institutions in the west were largely organized around the ideal of rehabilitation, and that the criminal legal system should play a welfare-like role in the lives of those under their supervision. The punitive turn, marking the rapid rise in U.S. rates of incarceration starting in the early 1970s, brought a departure from the rehabilitative ideal, and began the marked growth of mass punishment and what would later become known as mass (Garland, 2002) or hyper incarceration (Wacquant, 2009). Wacquant (2009) examines these early years of neoliberalism as the United States adopted new forms of governing the poor, moving away from Keynesian economics and redistributive social policies, and towards workfare (tying welfare benefits to work) and prisonfare (punishing those who did not abide by the workfare policies). Together, workfare and prisonfare led to what Wacquant called double regulation, integrating social and penal regulations towards a cumulative punishment of individuals who are poor, and disproportionately Black.

Soss et al. (2011) also build upon the arguments of Piven and Cloward (1971), referring to “poverty governance” not as a means to alleviate poverty but rather as a mechanism through which the state organizes cooperation and compliance from socially, politically, and economically marginalized populations—primarily, poor racialized individuals. They reject the conceptualization of welfare retrenchment, emphasizing the activated role of the neoliberal welfare state in the service of market forces. Workfare is not only a disciplining measure but one that recruits welfare recipients into a low wage workforce. Coupled with the highly racialized system of poverty governance, the neoliberal period, according to these welfare policy scholars, is characterized by the joining of once relatively distinct spheres of welfare and criminal legal systems into a unified system of surveillance and discipline.

Feminist theories of the welfare state, emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s, criticized the ungendered nature of theories current at the time or the conflation of the subjects of welfare state policies with working class men (Gordon, 1994; O’Connor, 1993; Orloff, 1993). In fact, feminist welfare theorists argue that welfare policies have always been highly gendered, with women historically (and currently) making up the majority of individuals on welfare rolls (Gordon, 1994). The focus on welfare benefits for women (and often including children), illuminates the contradictory nature of U.S. welfare. On the one hand, welfare policies, however regressive, have provided salutary material benefits for impoverished individuals and families including women and children. And as early theorists argued, welfare can afford poor and working class people the possible de-linking of life opportunities from the capitalist workplace (O’Connor, 1993). For women, such benefits may further reduce their economic reliance upon male breadwinners within marriage (Orloff, 1993). A historical survey of U.S. welfare response to the needs of women, however, reveals a deeply paternalistic and stigmatizing approach to public assistance targeting women, with strong racial biases denigrating and limiting benefits for Black women, immigrants, and other women of color (Abramovitz, 1988; Gordon, 1994). The interlocking forces of racial capitalism and gender oppression enabled the escalation of concentrated discipline upon women of color (Matambanadzo, 2022; Quadagno, 1994).

Looking at the more contemporary period, Abramovitz (2023), using the lens of social reproduction, aptly captures how the impacts of neoliberalism “…supplemented the diminished welfare state with punitive programs that favored economic production over social reproduction, accumulation over legitimization, and regulation over liberation” (p. 25). While people in poverty were being punished and regulated, corporations were increasingly offered protections from the risks of free market capitalism (Wacquant, 2012). The era of neoliberalism privileged a protected form of the free market above all else, diminished the limited but somewhat equalizing power of the welfare state, and as economic insecurity grew, so did the carceral and punitive systems and responses (Soss et al., 2011; Wacquant, 2009).

Contemporary abolitionist frameworks and practices are largely an outgrowth of critical feminist of color critiques of the caring professions’ entanglements with the carceral state—engaging the anti-violence field's emphasis on law enforcement to address domestic and sexual violence (Kim, 2013, 2018; Richie, 2012). Building upon the anti-carceral and abolitionist social movement formations of Critical Resistance and INCITE! and informed by their political struggles as feminist, anti-racist practitioners within what has been named as a carceral feminist anti-violence sector (Kim, 2013, 2018), these activist scholars point out the close relationship between the carceral state and the caring state—or what Garland (2016) referred to as the disciplining social work and personal social services sector. These conceptual and empirical studies demonstrated how even emancipatory social service sectors can succumb to the logic and institutions of the carceral state through the conflation of safety or protection with the monopolizing violence of the state. They also revealed how non-state, non-profit actors have expanded the carceral web through collaboration with law enforcement. Examination of the anti-violence sector yielded an important case study showing how welfare functions inside and outside the state directly tie to the carceral state. Related work on transformative justice and community accountability as abolitionist praxis addressing the harms of domestic and sexual violence have moved beyond critiques of carceral feminism and the state to re-imagine and build abolitionist praxis divested of ties to the state in its welfare or carceral forms (Davis et al., 2022; Kim, 2013, 2018).

Despite the persistence of a small strand of social workers and social work scholars in the continued analysis of the punitive functions of social work, neoliberalism's hold across the field and the elevation of individualized, clinical forms of social work hid its disciplining functions under the platitudes of social work's commitment to professionalism and a nebulous notion of social justice (Jacobs et al., 2021; NAASW, 2022). More recent attention to the disciplining nature of social work as an arm of the system of social/public assistance, child welfare, and other regulating systems of care has unearthed radical traditions in social work and built upon more recent praxis and scholarship that both critiques social work and points to abolitionist possibilities (Jacobs et al., 2021; Dettlaff, 2023; Murray et al., 2023; Roberts, 2022).

The U.S. welfare state has always been stained by racial capitalism and the punitive impulse (and structures) that have provided both the justification and means by which racial hierarchies and capitalism have been maintained (Katznelson, 2005; Quadagno, 1994; Soss et al., 2011; Wacquant, 2009). The carceral and neoliberal boom of the last 50 years brought the disciplining functions of the welfare state into full view as the double regulation and punitive policies of both the welfare state and the carceral state increased dramatically. And yet the welfare state, both historically, and today, has provided meaningful and necessary relief to tens of millions of people during any given period. We can legitimately critique the welfare state, its history, and the punishing force it has played, while at the same time acknowledging the critical role it has played and continues to play in meeting (some) people's needs. In this way, the welfare state is paradoxical, representing what Bourdieu (1999) referred to as both the left (caring) and right (punitive) hands of the state (Wacquant, 2010). This paradox leads us to the abolitionist questions about whether a non-carceral state is possible, and more specifically, about the role of the welfare state in the abolitionist horizon.

Abolition and the State

Abolitionists are fighting for an end to the carceral state and the prison industrial complex. This is an unequivocal abolitionist position. Still, as this article reveals, other aspects and functions of the “caring” state—such as public education, health and mental health care, and housing—are not immune to the forces that produced the carceral state. Like systems of criminalization, policing, and incarceration, welfare state institutions have been constituted by racialized heteropatriarchal supremacy and punishment since their inception, and have become more punitive throughout the era of neoliberalism (Abramovitz, 2001, 2023; Soss et al., 2011; Wacquant, 2009). Among abolitionist scholars and organizers, questions about the possibilities of a non-carceral state or alternative systems of governance are growing.

In No More Police (2022), Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie ask “is there an abolitionist form of stateness? What might a state look like if it's unyoked from racial capitalism and explicitly organized around abolitionist priorities?” (p. 208). While no singular answer is offered, they review differing ideas about the abolitionist possibilities and limitations of the state. Some, like Gilmore and Gilmore (2007), believe the state can be changed and remade to meet material needs at scale, respond to large-scale crises, and leveraged towards participatory governance and liberatory education. Others, like Spade (2021) and Anderson (2021), believe that the state will always be a “technology of extraction” (Interrupting Criminalization, 2022a, p. 8) and that the violence of the state is not an unfortunate byproduct of the state, but an essential element to ensuring its continued existence. Kaba and Ritchie (2022) map a set of possibilities regarding abolitionist state formations or systems of governance but do not resolve if and what the role of state will be in the abolitionist future. They do, however, offer some foundational principles that can help in shaping further inquiry into questions about abolition and the state, including the welfare state. They write “For us, two things are clear 1) The carceral, racial capitalist state cannot be reformed, or captured and repurposed, and 2) abolition and racial capitalism cannot co-exist” (Kaba & Ritchie, 2022, p. 213).

In confronting the possibilities and limitations of the welfare state's abolitionist ends, there are substantial structural questions about whether the state, in general, and the welfare state, in particular, can exist beyond racial capitalism and without the carcerality that has been so central to the existence and governance of the state. Notions of an abolition democracy have been offered by Du Bois (1935) and, later, Davis (2005), informing aspirations for a state no longer captured by racial capitalism and carceral dominance. While we, like Kaba and Ritchie, do not offer an answer, we see the clear articulation of these larger questions as critical as to considering how relationships to the welfare state today further or hinder the abolitionist horizon.

Current and Future Considerations

History has demonstrated that the welfare state in and of itself is not emancipatory. Borrowing from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the welfare state has existed to “save capitalism from capitalism” (Gilmore 2022, min, 1:43) rather than to ensure the welfare of all peoples, and in various ways has played a disciplining role in the social regulation of people at the margins. At the same time, in societies with capitalist economies like the United States, provisions from the welfare state like social insurance have played a significant, though uneven, role in keeping many people out of poverty and providing some level of economic, social, and political security. Given this, it makes sense that many in the work of abolition are ambivalent about the role of the welfare functions of the state but are reluctant to dismiss engagement with the welfare state.

In the present, this may translate into demands for the continued or increased social provisions that welfare states have offered and should offer—social/public assistance, health and mental healthcare, housing, childcare, elder care, education, disability access and supports, living wage jobs, and guaranteed basic incomes. Given the critique of the welfare state under capitalism, do these demands further translate into struggles for a stronger and larger welfare state, with greater universal programs, like health and mental healthcare? Or do demands for a stronger welfare state in the contemporary context distract us from the work of abolition?

Implications for Social Welfare

The welfare state is squarely in the domain of social work education, research and practice. Social work scholars across the United States conduct research about a range of issues related to the welfare state, including the nature of the welfare state itself. And social workers across the country are working on myriad issues related to the welfare state and social welfare policy. As abolitionist frameworks permeate social work institutions and practice, they raise thorny questions about the role of the state in the provision of social goods, and its role in realizing a just society.

The development of prison abolition has been significantly shaped by abolitionist feminists and feminisms (Davis et al., 2022). While the critique of carceral feminist anti-violence practices are foundational to the analysis of the carceral state and the creation of abolitionist practices, the welfare state has a long history of critical feminist theorizing and empirical research. For critical feminist practitioners and scholars, questions of the welfare state have been central to our understanding of the highly gendered framing and provision of welfare benefits, the stigmatization of welfare beneficiaries, and the shaping of social reproduction under racial capitalism. The extension of such critical feminist analyses on the welfare state to include an abolitionist lens can lend itself to more advanced formulations of the role and functions of the welfare state and strategies for the enhanced well-being of all in an abolitionist future.

In this article, we seek less to provide answers or remedies, and more so to shape and sharpen questions for continued inquiry, study, and action. While contemporary social and political conditions have reinvigorated radical social work traditions and coupled them with abolitionist critiques of the carceral state, we have been troubled by the lack of attention to the welfare state in our considerations of an abolitionist future. The welfare state, we find, has played a necessary and contradictory role in the maintenance of racial capitalism. It has mitigated the excesses of capitalism, thereby offering course corrections to capitalism while assuaging critical forces that might have otherwise disrupted or even usurped capitalism and its capitalist ruling classes. It has blunted analysis of the structural causes of social problems—poverty, homelessness, mental illness, chronic health disorders, and so on—in favor of a focus on individual misfortune or, more likely, individual failures. It has championed charity and white and elite supremacist delusions of rescue over mutual aid and self-determination. It has colluded with forces of discipline, exclusion, capture, and death in the name of care and social justice. And yet, the welfare state and the institutions and agents of social work have offered acts of care and compassion that have, despite the welfare state's oppressive function, offered sustenance and saved lives. On the other side of the welfare state's contradictory role and carceral collusions are the lessons it lends to our understanding of the provision of social welfare and supports for well-being in the future.

While this article is far from offering robust recommendations, it makes small steps in examining a sector of the racial capitalist state that has remained too long in the shadows. As Garland (2016) claims, the welfare state is short on charismatic champions—rather, it remains in the mundane world of administrators and civil servants. Despite the quotidian, bureaucratic, and denigrated world of the welfare state, it has served an important role not only in the maintenance of capitalism but in addressing, even if poorly, social needs—a function that will continue to be necessary and important no matter what our future holds.

Social work's study of the welfare state would benefit from further inquiry into the intersections of abolitionist frameworks, social welfare provision, and the possibilities and limitations of the racial capitalist state that is the United States. Doing so also requires more attention to the social work profession's relationship to the state, and to racial capitalism; relationships that have received limited attention from social work scholars. The questions offered in this paper seek to invite further inquiry into how abolitionist frameworks change the lens through which social work views the welfare state and delve deeper into the paradoxes of moving from the current welfare state arrangements, towards more liberatory possibilities in which more and more people, have more and more of what they need.