Social rights and social resistance: opportunism, anarchism and the welfare state

This conceptually oriented paper adopts a critical perspective on the quest ion of social rights and asks whether, in contemporary circumstances, claim s to social welfare based on rights can provide a meaningful basis for soci al resistance to poverty or oppression. Past approaches to the question of rights as a means of resistance are characterised as either opportunistic o r anarchistic. Opportunistic approaches give rise to ameliorative compromis e, anarchistic approaches to nihilistic or inherently hopeless struggle. No netheless, it is argued, it is possible to conceptualise rights to social w elfare in ways that do not obscure the basis of social exploitation and tha t do project human need as the basis for social resistance.