Social democracy, in any meaningful sense of the word, has been in crisis for decades. Even amongst the Nordics the game for years has been accommodation to capital and not leadership of it. In the immediate post-war years social democracy set the agenda, next came a period of capital accommodating itself to our social agenda but since the late 1970s it is neo-liberalism that has taken ideological, economic and political control. Labour and social democratic governments in Britain and Germany in particular were in office for much of this period, often with commanding majorities, but never wanted to or felt able to break away from market fundamentalism.

The crisis is deep rooted and systematic. It is a crisis of political economy, agency and organisation. If social democracy is to have a future then it must fundamentally break with the tenets of old social democracy. Clearly there is no homogeneous working class and unions are weaker but class still matters. The deferential, mass and centralising society of the middle decades of the last century have gone – mostly we must say for good. Critically the centrality of growth and the politics of more are hitting up against the immovable ceiling of sustainability and climate change.

There will be three key futures of a future social democracy; it will be red in that solidarity and equality must be two core goals; it will be green and have to learn to live and therefore redistribute within much tighter growth constraints and it must be democratic. Certainly in Britain democracy for Labour was the means to the ends of power. Now democracy has to be recognised as an intrinsic and not just an instrumental part of this tripartite value set.

The trick is binding the three together onto a coherent and systematic narrative that speaks to real peoples struggles and anxieties in a world set on making us work harder for our Prada. The argument has to be that you can’t have just one of equality, sustainability or democracy. They come instead as a set. To have one you have to support and work for the other two. This is right in both theory and practice as they combine not just the right value set for our times but the ability to mobilise mass support for a new social democratic project. Through the interplay of all three we start to have a vision for the good society that mixes the desirable with the feasible as an effective but transformative p0litical project takes shape.

And it is starting to happen. In Germany at the weekend the voters rejected the Christian Democrats in two states in favour of the prospect of a left/green alliance of the SPD, the Left Party and the Greens. The SPD has broken out of the labourist ghetto by admitting that it could form an alliance with the Left Party and the Greens. How this translates at the election later this month we don’t know. But it gives the SPD hope. Here in Britain just before the summer Compass, the organisation I chair, had its most successful conference when over 1200 delegates listened to speeches from leading members of Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.

The economic crisis, climate change and people’s impatience with old politics means the objective conditions exist for a revival of social democracy, but only if we are brave and ambitious enough to renew our historic project. Following the publication of the Jon Cruddas and Andrea Nahles report The Good Society,  Compass working with comrades in the SPD and others across Europe will be creating the space for a dialogue on how to shape this kind of special democracy. If you want to be kept in touch with this project then pleas email me at: neal {at} compassonline.org(.)uk. The future is still ours to make – but it must be different from the successes and failures of the past.