redistributing income and wealth from the rich to the poor. But, as Kincaid is able to show through countless examples, this is not the case. The employer's contribution to the costs of social security is passed on to the wage earner through higher prices, and the employee's contribution operates as another tax whose burden falls most heavily on the low paid. The tax system is far too mild in its effects on the upper income brackets to have much effect. Where there is any serious redistribution - as with the Housing Finance Act - it is from the lower middle class and the better-off sections of the working class to the poorest sections of the working class. The rich remain relatively untouched Kincaid is at his best when he steps 'inside the heads' of the party policy makers, especially those of the Labour Party, and retraces the machinations of their thinking about welfare policy. Especially worth reading is his description of how the Labour Party chopped around Richard Crossman's original 1957 earnings related pension scheme, once they realised the extent to which it would involve them in a serious measure of income redistribution (sec Chapter 7).
APPLES DO FALL There are many useful and interesting anecdotes, case studies and facts in the book. But at the end the reader is left with far more questions than answers.
The reason for this is that Kincaid never gets down to the guts of the matter. Why did the capitalist state get into the business of social welfare in the first place? How has this affected the operation of capitalist society today? Not only are these questions never answered, but it appears that the author doesn't even regard them as important. There is no serious discussion, for example, of the way in which social welfare spending has fitted into the post-war 'Keynesian' economic policies of the capitalist state - the use of welfare spending to manipulate the level of demand in the capitalist economy and cushion it against the crises of overproduction which are an inevitable part of the capitalist system.
The author only resorts to the use of the scientific term "capitalism' on three occasions, elsewhere preferring thoroughly confused and confusing phrases like a society organised on a deeply competitive basis. This serves to make his lack of theoretical clarity even worse. Kincaid ends up demonstrating conclusively that apples do fall, but we are left no nearer to the law of gravity. 'MOVING TOWARDS SOCIALISM' This is all the more serious when one takes into account the fact that Kincaid is not just a run-of- if it is to successfully arm the working class the mill empiricist academic, but a militant in a revolutionary organisation the internationa Socialists. Statements like one he makes on page 23 to the effect that a society that increases the proportion of its national resources devoted to social security is moving 'in the direction of a socialist society' thus have a serious political importance. This is a dangerous reformist conception. As Ernest Mandel has said, a society can no more be a 'little bit socialist' than a woman can be a little bit pregnant As articles in recent issues of Red Weekly have pointed out, social democratic parties can make all kinds of 'left' turns in a period of growing capitalist crisis. An important part of such manoeuvres would be increased social welfare expenditure. Anyone who goes around telling the working class that this is a move 'in the direction of a socialist society' is sowing a very dangerous conception that can only serve to confuse the working class movement about the meaning of social democracy.
The job of making a serious Marxist analysis of the welfare state and its relationship to capitalist social and economic strategy still remains to he done. It will have to be carried out in very different terms from those of this present book against sociai democracy and aid in the struggle for a socialist society.
From JAVED HUSSEIN