O analiză exemplară a fundăturii în care se află social-democrația azi

Social democrats face irrelevance at best, extinction at worse

Is social democracy already dead and like the proverbial headless chicken are we simply running round the yard on instinct before we topple over for good? If social democracy is still alive, it’s hard to know how or why. Let’s look at the evidence.

No social democratic party anywhere in the world is on the front foot. Sure, parties may find themselves in government – as they do in Denmark, Germany and France, in their own right or as part of a coalition – but this happens by accident and tends to be down to the failures of the right. And in office, social democrats tend to follow austerity or austerity-lite measures.  No social democratic party has a strident and confident set of intellectual and organisational ideas that propel a meaningful alternative political project. The future looks incredibly bleak. Why?

The reasons are not hard to find.  Social democracy is a 19th-century construct that achieved some successes in the 20th-century but is hopelessly prepared for the 21st century. This is because all the forces that once made social democrats strong have disappeared. The collective experience of the war, the existence of a unified, organised and seemingly growing working class and the brooding presence of the Soviet Union – a threatening alternative to free markets that forced big concessions from employers who feared revolution happening in the West – all combined to ensure that capitalism momentarily made historic compromises with social democratic parties.

With hindsight, this “golden era” should be viewed as a historic blip but social democrats have continued to mistake it as the norm. They then compound this error to devastating effect. Having lost their external sources of power, they focus almost entirely on electing ‘the right leaders’ who, they believe, will re-enact the ‘golden era’ from above. This is a technocratic politics devoid of movements, any understanding of historic context or the geo-politics that shapes the everyday actions of politicians and people alike. Social democrats are surfers without waves.

But time has not stood still. The 20th-century underpinnings of social democracy have not just evaporated, but have been replaced by other hostile forces. Globalisation and individualisation act as pincers to further restrict the possibilities of any social democratic renewal. Globalisation – the flight of capital and the downward pressure on taxes and regulation it engenders – signals the death knell of socialism in one county. Meanwhile, individualism and the culture of turbo-consumption make social solidarity difficult to say the least.  In such a world, not only have we thankfully lost the sense of deference that made much of the paternalistic social democracy of the last century possible, but the good life has become something to be purchased by the lone consumer and not collectively created by the citizen. The endless formation and reformation of our identities through competitive consumption destroys the very social fabric that social democracy needs to take root. Today, it would seem, there is no alternative.

The brief upturn in the electoral fortunes of social democrats in the mid 1990s around the third way, the new middle and Clintonism was won at the expense of the further erosion of an increasingly ignored electoral base. In the mistaken belief it had nowhere else to go, core support was traded for core values and reliance pinned on a dysfunctional financialised capitalism that backfired spectacularly in 2008 with social democrats caught with their fingers in the neo-liberal till.

This existential crisis of social democracy finds its ultimate expression in the continuing crisis of capitalism. If the historic goal of social democracy is to humanise capitalism, then the way in which public finances have been used to bail out the banks at the expense of the people who are capitalism’s victims, proves the paucity of the social democrat position.

Where the crisis hit hardest, the social democrats fell furthest and fastest. Today PASOK in Greece barely exists. The PSOE in Spain are fairing badly and have ben overtaken in the polls by Podemos – a party less than a year old! In Scotland, Labour faces replacement by nationalists. Everywhere else, social democrats struggle as populism and an anti-politics mood sweeps Europe.

All of this is obvious. But social democrats seem unable to do anything more than shrug and go back to the same orthodoxies. They push at the edges of fiscal and regulatory boundaries but never really break with the constraints of neo-liberalism. They act as if the same class divisions existed, still take their core voters for granted and behave as if the planet wasn’t finite. They vie for office, to pull leavers that have long since rusted and ceased up. The baggage of the past just seems too heavy to let go.  Adopting Einstein’s definition of insanity – they do the same thing again and again and expect a different outcome.

So what is to be done? Social democrats are going to have to be brave – really brave – or face irrelevance at best, extinction at worse. There are three key challenges.

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