Towards a reparative welfare state

The writings of TH Marshall, Esping Anderson and other welfare state scholars have been concerned with class-based inequalities bought about through capitalism. Yet the focus on exploitation of labour overlooks racialised and gendered inequalities bought about through historic and contemporary processes of expropriation also inherent in capitalism. In this paper, I argue that addressing processes of expropriation are fundamental to the political economy of the welfare state and propose a reparative way of thinking to transform the welfare state. Drawing on insights from the transformative reparation literature, I outline three modes of transformation–unsettling accumulation by dispossession, disrupting dehumanising subjectivities and supporting pluriversal possibilities as processes to transform the structures that uphold expropriation and the welfare state.