http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/06/social-democracy-and-social-progress/
Social Democracy and Social Progress *
by Steve McGiffen
Dissident Voice: June 6th, 2011
European centre-left leaders gathered recently in Oslo to discuss their
difficulties in winning power, as well as their inability to do anything
with it once they've got it.
Patrick Diamond believes that recent local electoral success "cannot
disguise the governing crisis which threatens Labour's very survival as a
party of power." He should know. He was one of the author's of the British
Labour Party's last election manifesto. This 'crisis' is not confined to
Britain, however.
Centre-left parties hold office in Norway, Greece, Spain and Portugal, but
only in the first of these do their policies bear any resemblance to social
democracy, the political philosophy behind the movement which brought us the
welfare state, low rates of poverty, and a code of values based on equality,
solidarity and dignity.
This may be because the Norwegian government includes a party to the left of
the social democrats, or it may be because as a non-member of the EU, the
country's rulers have a bit more space to determine policies than do those
of the twenty-seven countries bound hand and foot by the neoliberal Lisbon
Treaty.
A recent poll conducted in the US, Britain, Germany and Sweden found that
the vast majority of people in those countries do not believe that
governments can stand up to vested interests, while sizeable minorities -
almost three in ten in Britain - are sceptical of any possibility that
governments can be effective in bringing about positive social change.
This is hardly surprising, when governments of the centre-left have signally
failed to reproduce anything like the achievements of social democracy of
the post-war years. This is unsurprising, given the undeniable fact that
they have failed to challenge the logic of neoliberalism.
Take the financial crisis and the economic crisis which it provoked. The
problem began with a US sub-prime mortgage crisis which was the result of a
process of national and international deregulation of financial services
which centre-left parties might have been expected to resist. After all,
there is nothing particularly radical in believing that consumers, public
and private, as well as honest investors, should be protected from the
unscrupulous and the greedy. Instead, nominally social democratic leaders
were amongst the most enthusiastic advocates of global financial anarchy.
Once the system collapsed, governments bailed out the very institutions most
culpable in bringing the crisis about. The result was that a wave of
destruction caused by the private sector was magically transformed into a
crisis of government debt. The people's money was used to ensure that the
people's enemies continue to sleep off their champagne suppers under silken
sheets.
In Britain, the government is not only venal and absolutely unrepresentative
of the country's people, it is also incompetent, floundering into an
electoral trouncing, the junior partner staring into the abyss of total
meltdown. The same is clearly true of Spain, while in Greece PASOK has
failed to mount any sort of challenge to the rape of their country by the
combined forces of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and
the International Monetary Fund.
Of course, centre-left parties may return to government in some countries as
desperate electorates look for some alternative to the kleptocrats of the
right. Yet there is absolutely no sense that, when people vote against
neoliberal governments, they are voting for anything at all.
When I first voted Labour, in 1974, at the age of 19, I had a clear idea
that the party stood for a gradualist approach to social progress. Although
it was clearly not going to lead Britain to a glorious socialist future, on
an electoral level it was all we had. Blair transformed it into a fully
bourgeois party with only nominal links to the working class.
This has been demonstrated by the Labour leadership's failure to promote a
social democratic response to the intensified class war unleashed in the
wake of the crisis, a pattern reproduced in almost every country of Europe.
In some ways this is puzzling. Labour consistently shunned real left
politics on the grounds, ostensibly, that they would not have been popular
with sufficient voters. Whether this was really the case in the past or not
is debatable, but it is surely the case that in the face of the crisis a
programme of real reform of the financial sector would, as the global
economy began to fall apart, taking people's jobs with it, have been
popular.
A Keynesian programme, including counter-cyclical investment and public
ownership of banks, would have been capable of mobilising broad support.
Proving to people that the state can stand up for their interests in the
face of the concentrated power which is the inevitable product of
deregulated markets would have had the chance of restoring faith in
democracy. There are whole areas of public life which are being undermined
by cynicism, corruption and nepotism. This could be tackled by a programme
of reform which could be carried out at no great expense.
The survey cited above also showed that people associate the centre-left
with high taxation, but that they do not object to taxes per se. It's just
that they want value for money. Taxation to strengthen public services,
education and health care has majority support.
Most people in Western Europe are, even if they don't know it, social
democrats. Survey after survey has shown that people want a strong welfare
state, health care accessible to all, sound pensions and a good system of
education.
The social democrats do not heed this because they are now, as much as the
frankly neoliberal parties of the right, representatives of big capital, and
not of working people at all. They do not heed it because they are unwilling
and unable to challenge the dictatorship of the European Central Bank and
the European Commission.
For socialists to support such people is to indulge in a pessimistic
nostalgia which has no real relationship to the world as it is now.
Electoral politics in the context of European Union member states, hidebound
as parliaments are by the Lisbon Treaty and all it represents, can only ever
be protest politics.
Movement are stirring - Spain's indignants, UK Uncut, the Greek resistance -
which promise to be far more effective than the passive strategy of putting
a cross next to the name of the candidate whose party will, you hope, close
down the fewest hospitals.
This is not an argument against voting. If you have real socialist parties
in your country, vote for them. If you think the social democrats will at
least put a barrier up to the rise of the far right, by all means vote for
them. But do it without illusions - and understand that the struggle for
socialism, for decency, equality, solidarity - for simple dignity - is
happening somewhere else entirely.
This article first appeared at *Spectrezine <http://www.spectrezine.org/>*.
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