Owen Jones has a brilliant description of how the state doles out welfare to the rich whilst bashing the poor. What should be the political response to this?

I fear that social democrats see this merely as a failing of personnel; if only we had politicians of enough courage and sense of justice, things would be different. In fact, this is nowhere near enough. There are powerful structural reasons for the pattern Owen describes - for why, in Marx's words, the state is "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." I'm not thinking here merely of the fact that capitalists make political donations and offer well-paid jobs to superannuated politicians and expect their money's worth from doing so. There are two other mechanisms.

One is that governments need economic growth, which makes them dependent upon capitalists. Michal Kalecki put this well:

Under a laissez-faire system the level of employment depends to a great extent on the so-called state of confidence. If this deteriorates, private investment declines, which results in a fall of output and employment...This gives the capitalists a powerful indirect control over government policy: everything which may shake the state of confidence must be carefully avoided because it would cause an economic crisis.

This explains why the government gave big handouts to the banks. In 2008 bankers could credibly claim that without those handouts, the economy would have collapsed.

Broadening the point slightly, it also explains the spread of outsourcing. In a world of secular stagnation, profits can't grow much through ordinary investment and technical change, as both are weak. Instead, profits must grow by expanding the domain in which profits can emerge - hence the corporatizing of state functions.

Secondly, politicians believe that the private sector has management expertise. Outsourcing happens because ministers think that the private sector can manage some functions better than government. And the banks were left unreformed because the government thought bankers' expertise was necessary to restore the banks to profitability.

A reversal of the trends which Owen decries requires a weakening of these two mechanisms. Is this possible?

I suspect the second mechanism is the more vulnerable one. The left can and should devote far more effort to attacking the myth that private sector managers have expertise. This would consist of:

- Pointing out that the claim to such expertise is very often merely an ideological front for theft.

- Emphasising the distinction between markets and capitalism. Insofar as the private sector does increase efficiency, it is to a large extent because market forces drive out (pdf) inefficient producers, and not because good management raises the performance of existing ones.The fact that outsourcing firms are often incompent fraudsters shows how hard it is to raise efficiency in honest ways.

- Granted, there is sometimes such a thing as good management. But it consists (pdf) in ensuring good control and feedback structures are in place. It does not mean mindless wibble about leadership, stategy and vision.

- Where some people have the skill to build such structures, their expertise should be under democratic control. The expertise of scientists and economists is subordinate to the political process. The expertise of managers should be no different.

Saying all this, though, merely runs into a problem. The state is actually shifting in the exactly opposite direction. It is embracing a top-down cult of management which is the enemy of creativity and professionalism.

Marx thought that the pro-capitalist state could only wither away after a socialist revolution. I fear he was right - and that such a revolution is a distant prospect.