From Ability to Need: Social Welfare and Educational Policy

Abstract

For the majority of the population, regime legitimacy rests not so much on general macro-economic or sectoral performance as upon the more tangible outputs of social policy. From its inception, the Leninist model of transition to a socialist society has included three criteria which have considerable implications for the role of social policy. First, the transfer into public ownership of the means of production and distribution would serve to abolish social-class domination. Second, although people would be paid according to their work in the transitional stage of socialism, economic policy would reduce income differentials substantially, with the gradual displacement of economic incentives by moral and non-material incentives. There would also be a shift in the basis of distribution of economic rewards toward the principle of need rather than desert, and upon the parity of esteem between mental and manual labour. Finally, the transitional phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat would gradually give way to a participatory self-managing society as all vestiges of the state as an oppressive apparatus withered away (George and Manning, 1980, p. 3).