Social Policy and Class Inequality: Some Notes on Welfare State Limits

Abstract

Whether capitalism is still capitalism-that old dog of a controversy whose very refusal to lie down and die suggests that its object remains no less alive-hangs in large part on the answers to two questions about the state: its role in production and its role in distribution. Of course the two cannot, in the end, be kept apart; they are intertwined because capitalism as a mode of production is also a mode of exploitation. But my concern here will be, in essence, only with the second question: with the distributional impact of government social policy, the effects of the "welfare state" on class inequality. I have misgivings about treading on ground much of which is already well-trodden. But there are patches of that ground which still look rather desolate-in between the large and flat acres of practical description of welfare provisions; the smaller though widening and bumpy strips of general theorising about the philosophical premises, formative socio-political contexts and ideological orientations of social policy; and the tracks marked out by cartographers of poverty. There are, in particular, questions left open about the limits of state action as a means to modify the patterns of exploitation-of "differential reward", to use another vocabulary-set by the property and market mechanisms of a capitalist economy.