Tag archive for ‘Equality’
Sustainability will not be delivered without Equality
Global warming and climate change pose ever more urgently the question of how the world shares its resources. Environmental constraints mean the old capitalist trick of making and promising an ever increasing cake will not work any more, or not for much longer anyway. The question of how the cake is shared has to be [...]
Towards a Co-operative Europe
Human flourishing requires conditions of relative equality. Progressives have always realised this and have traditionally looked to the state to deliver. This has led to many successes, particularly in the 1945-75 period when robust profitability (rooted in the re-stocking of manufacturing capacity destroyed in World War II) and the communist threat obtained many social concessions [...]
The Good Society Conference – Equality Session
On 21st and 22nd January 2010 more than 50 participants from almost 20 countries participated in the Good Society Conference organised by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation London and Compass. The conference was based on the issues discussed during the Good Society Debate. Watch the session on the Good Society and equality below.
The need for a new Socialist Politics
Are social democrats capable of responding to the opportunities for renewed support for socialism that are offered by the present crisis? Social democrats have lost ground in Europe during the last few years. The SPD fell to a historical low in the Germany federal election last year, French socialists have been in decline since the [...]
A Good Society and a Good Life
We need to resist the neoliberal tendency to reduce everything to the economic. Neoliberalism has not only led to the reorganisation of all sectors of society in accordance with market principles; it has also implied a fundamental redefinition of human life in terms of economic criteria. As well as reframing fundamental political and social ideas [...]
The Next Left: Lessons from the Past, Challenges for the Future
New thinking is needed to enable social democrats to overcome their divisions and begin to work together. The Treaty of Maastricht of 1992 marks an historical moment: a Community based on economic principles transformed itself into a politically and socially aware European Union. Following on from this, the leading political families established europarties, and during [...]
All Served In A Bucket – With Eggs On Top
Can social democracy be a goal in itself, and not just a means to some other end? ‘I have not moved to the left, it’s the world that has shifted to the right’, said a Norwegian conservative politician some years ago, commenting on his seemingly leftist stance after retirement. And this shift to the right [...]
Reinventing the Notion of Equality
It is time to rebuild the consensus for equality that was destroyed by neoliberal hegemony. The social-democratic contracts adopted throughout the West in the aftermath of the thirty years of war and depression of the first half of the twentieth century implied that public policies would henceforth be geared towards establishing and consolidating a society [...]
