Social democrats need to reassert the protective power of the state – this time through global institutions.
Ten years ago Gerhard Schröder declared that: ‘economic policy is neither left not right. It is either good or bad’. Today we can conclude that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then, eleven out of fifteen governments of the European Union were run by socialists. Now – in election after election, in country after country – the left has been elbowed out of state power. The crucial point, though, is that such changes of the guard have ceased to matter.
In the course of the last decade, social democratic parties have presided over an ‘economic policy’ consisting of the privatisation of gains and the nationalisation of losses; they have run states preoccupied with deregulation, privatisation and individualisation. It is no wonder that voters have come to associate social democrats with the neoliberal policy of dismantling the communal frameworks of existential security, leaving individual men and women to manage their fates on their own, from their individual and mostly scarce and inadequate resources. There is now next to nothing to distinguish between the ‘left’ the ‘right’, in economic, or any other, policy.
In recent years to be on the ‘left’ has come to signal an intention to be more thorough than the ‘right’ in carrying out the agenda of the right, and better at protecting such undertakings from the backlash inevitably caused by their dire social consequences. It was Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ that laid institutional foundations under Margaret Thatcher’s inchoate ideas about there being no such thing as society, ‘only individuals and families’. It was the French Socialist Party that did most work on the dismantling of the French social state. And in East-Central Europe it is the ‘post-communist’ parties, renamed as ‘social democrats’ (wary as they are of being accused of lingering devotion to their communist past), that are the most enthusiastic and vociferous advocates – and most consistent practitioners – of unlimited freedom for the rich and the leaving of the poor to their own care.
Previously, the distinctive mark of social democracy was the belief that it is the duty of a community to protect all its members against the powerful forces that they are unable to resist as individuals. And people’s hopes were pinned on the modern state for the carrying out of this task – a state powerful enough to force economic interests to respect the political will of the nation and the ethical principles of the national community. But nation-states are no longer sovereign in any aspects of common life on their own territory. Genuine powers – the powers that decide the range of life options and life chances available for most of our contemporaries – have evaporated from the nation-state into the global space. Politics, however, has remained local, and is no longer able to reach the powerful, let alone constrain them. We now have power freed from political supervision in the global space, and politics without power in the local space.
The big question is whether any political force is capable of stemming the tides of globalisation – of capital, trade, finance, industry, criminality, drugs and weapon trafficking, terrorism, and the migration of the victims of all these forces – while having at their disposal solely the means of a single state … Well, they can try – as North Korea has done, or China, or Burma, or Cuba, or Kyrgyzstan – but the consequences for their residents are too well-known not to be resented by most of them.
It is no longer possible to construct a ‘social state’ that guarantees existential security to all its members within the framework of the nation-state. Globally produced problems can be only solved globally. The only thinkable solution to the globally generated tide of existential insecurity is to match the powers of the already globalised forces with the powers of politics, popular representation, law, jurisdiction; in other words, there is a need for the remarriage of power and politics – currently divorced – but this time at the global, planetary, all-humanity level. True, the odds seem stacked against such an endeavour; but the odds have always been weighted against social democratic visions of good society – and who recently has managed better than social democrats in the pursuit of their goals against apparently overwhelming odds (recently renamed ‘public opinion polls’)?
In the third century of its history, social democracy is facing a challenge that requires it to reconstitute itself as a planetary political force, and to strive to tame and constrain the global powers that are dedicated to dismantling the social and ethical conquests it made in its first two centuries.
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That would involve growing the spine to reclaim one’s ideology and label as terms of pride and not insults, but this would also require major ideological work against “la pensée unique” that has almost triumphed with only the global civil society to push back as national parties may not be the right vehicle for this.
Globally connected social movements might work better but the “dinosaurs” in many European socialist and social-democratic party still control quite a bit of power when it comes to money and mobilization despite a “crisis of legitimacy.”
The article is, in my view, correct. Over the last twenty years, Social Democracy has negated its ideological and philosophical justifications. The Parties of the ‘Socialist’ International were and are active agents of privatisation, hand-maidens to neo-liberalism. Such Parties should, but do not represent an alternative to the unjust society which presently exists.
The critique of policy from a Social Democratic perspective is welcome. Unfortunately, I’ve been reading similar material for nearly ten years. Leaderships of the ‘social democratic’ parties don’t appear to be listening nor do they want to.
Bauman is right in principle. But how we can reconnect power and politics on the global level when we seem incapable of doing it on the national let alone European level is beyond me. Let’s try this nationally and on the European level first. Then we can talk about the global picture.
The problem with global institutions is that they represent an increase in scale, and often as a result, an increase in bureaucratic inertia.
Where we encounter the state as citizens is at a local level – it seems to me that there should be a greater degree of direct democratic participation at this level, through programmes of participatory budgeting and deliberative decision-making.
Where we most have need of democratic power is in the workplace, which means restoring the counterbalance of strong trade unions to match the power of big business. This will be done in the specific case of the UK through repealing legislation that regulates trade unions at the level of the state, so that trade unions can act as genuinely autonomous institutions.
Bauman’s is the only piece in this set which actually tells it like it is. The reality is that across Europe ‘Social Democratic’ parties have generally been more neo-liberal in their actions than ‘right’ parties working in either an ordoliberal tradition – to regard New ‘Labour’ as to the left of say the German Christian Democrats is risible nonsense – or even in terms of conservative nationalism as with Law and Justice in Poland. Social democrats in the 1950s and 1960s made a compromise with capitalism – not necessarily a bad thing at the time – and adopted a frame of reference which differed from ordoliberalism only in terms of detail and degree. Although written wholly outside the German ordoliberal tradition, Beveridge’s ‘Full Employment in a Free Society’ of 1944 expresses the same sort of position i.e. that capitalism can be regulated and tamed in the interests of social justice. That was the argument of Crosland’s ‘The Future of Socialism’ in the 1950s. What happened in the 90s was that even that position was abandoned in favour of a full scale endorsement of the virtues of capitalism and markets which was not even the position of UK One Nation Conservatism. What seems to have gone entirely, other than in relation to the German Left Party and the necessary logic of Green Parties (especially that of England and Wales), is a notion of the social democratic project as being something more than the regulation of market capitalism – that is of the project of the democratic transformation of capitalism into something else. This was understood to be not only desirable but necessary. Time to bring back Clause Four perhaps. Given that capitalism is delivering not only economic but also ecological crisis – we really do have no alternative.