The new generation of social democrats will need a better strategy than third-wayism.

The financial crisis is also the crisis of social democracy. Paradoxically, it is the right that has come out of crisis more strongly, generally by being better social democrats than social democrats themselves. Or, at least, so they would have us believe. The real nature of the new right is yet to be explored, but so far it has successfully borrowed social democracy’s clothes, in the form of a critique of capitalism from which social democracy itself has long since abdicated. So where is social democracy? And where could it go? Debating a future for social democracy requires, first, a helpful diagnosis of the state we are in.

The reason that the right can represent themselves as better Keynesians and transformers of an amoral capitalist system is simple. For the contemporary right, critiquing capitalism is opportunistic, while for social democracy it remains a taboo. Here is one of the central legacies of third-way-ism, which was a highly complex ‘-ism’, with roots – let’s face it – not only in neoliberalism but also in the history of social democracy itself. The third way was heavily influenced by some of the less romantic and idealistic strands of social democracy – technocracy, productivism and social engineering – in short, those strands that were more about the efficient managing of a capitalist society than its transformation. In the 1980s and 1990s social democracy abdicated from a worldview without which it is very hard to think and act social democrat. This has left electorates – and perhaps even worse, social democrats themselves – deeply uncertain of what social democracy is.

Where, then, does the future lie? It is banal but necessary to underline the following. Few moments in history have so clearly called out for social democracy. Climate change and financial crisis cannot be managed on the individual level. They require new policies, but also new ideologies, new ethics, new solidarities. In short they call for a future which is not about saving the system but about building a better place to be. I think that only social democracy can do this. But the future of social democracy hinges on its capacity to articulate this future, not in the form of spin – the new ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ that social democrats can often be heard talking about – but in the form of a coherent theory of our times, one that links ideology to concrete economic, social, cultural and political analysis. The challenges that face us in the present are of a magnitude that could make any political project seem defeated in advance. But in the interwar period social democracy was successful in its challenge to fascism, poverty, mass unemployment and the erosion of a global economic system. How? Through some key notions: the idea of the people as progressive, and not self-interested and chauvinistic; the idea of a historical compromise and alliance of classes (institutionalised in countries like Sweden in the welfare state, which reproduced values of solidarity and equality instead of breaking them down); a theory about the nature of industrial society that built on a critique of the devastating effects of capitalism; a careful appraisal of market mechanisms but a constant debating of its limits and side effects. These ideas are not obsolete.

The first thing that social democracy needs, then, is a theory of our times – which, to my mind, has to involve a critique of capitalism, because this is where a social-democratic project is distinct from other forces in the political centre. The second thing that we need is an analysis of the political landscape, and a capacity to govern the transformations that we are currently witnessing, which currently are open-ended but may not remain so for long. The third way was built on an analysis of the political landscape post-1989 – a landscape which social democracy conceived of as being fundamentally influenced by a kind of egoistic individualism; the rise of a hegemonic end-of-history market liberalism; and an oppressive form of globalisation. The third way was social democracy’s attempt to understand and survive in these conditions. Was it successful? Social democracy survived electorally. Where did it lead us? To a place in which social democracy no longer knows what it is.

But now the political landscape is changing again. The election of Barack Obama still represents a sea change in American politics, as well as the opening of a global window of opportunity. And more, the third-way generation is on its way out. The hope for social democracy lies in a new generation of social democrats, who came of political age not with the fall of communism, but with the restructurings of the welfare state that have meant that many of them have strong personal experiences of poverty, unemployment and social stigma; with the dishonesty of third-way newspeak and its political misalliances; with Iraq and the misconducted ‘war on terrorism’. Climate change and financial derivatives are their problems – because they will colonise their future. So I believe in a future for social democracy, and I think it lies in the people who will be coming into party power in the coming years, and who are likely to have some time to think things through.

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