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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Social democracy transformed « Previous | |Next »
September 24, 2004

We ended the previous post with a question: 'where does the undermining of social democracy leave this political tradition now'? This is important to us Australians because we are talking about the ALP that has transformed itself under Hawke/Keating, then under Latham.

This is an important question since, John Quiggin has argued that the era of neo-liberal tradition has ended. He then says:


"If the neoliberal revolution is behind us, what is ahead. I don't expect to see a return to the institutions of the postwar settlement, to the extent that they have been displaced by neoliberalism. I also don't anticipate a resumption of the rapid growth in the size of the state, relative to the economy as a whole that we saw in the postwar period (actually for the first 75 years of the 20th century). Nevertheless, we have seen a general reassertion of the view, acerbically summarised by WK Hancock that "Australian democracy has come to look upon the State as a vast public utility, whose duty is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number". The idea that governments could hand off their core responsibilities in health, education and the provision of physical infrastructure to markets or private providers has been abandoned."

So what are we referring to when we talk about social democracy. What does it (eg., Latham's ALP) stand for today?

Luke Martell answers this in terms of social democracy being modernized through an accommodation to neo-liberalism over the last two decades. This modernized social democracy is now the dominant form of social democracy. Martell says:


"Of course, elements of modernising social democracy were present in factions of traditional social democratic parties and vice-versa and recent and older social democratic parties were internally diverse. Rhetorical differences between new and old may have sometimes been greater than real differences. And the divergence between new and old may be stressed by modernisers in order to exaggerate their own novelty and avoid what are percieved to be electorally damaging connections with the past. Nevertheless, modernising social democracy has many discontinuities with traditional social democracy and now dominates the stated ideology and policies of social democratic parties in a way that it did not do so in the past."

Martell mentions the British Labour Party but the Australian Labor Party is another example. He says that:

" Modernising social democracy, in Britain at least, is not only about finding new means for old social democratic ends – new economic and social policies for pursuing equality and community – in a new globalised context. It has actually redefined old social democratic ends themselves: new times, new means and new ends or values."

How then has it redefined or transformed itself?

Martell gives various instances of the transformation of social democratic ends. Unsuprisingly, the first is equality:


"One significant shift is from equality not only to equal opportunities but to minimum opportunities. Blair [and Latham] does not believe in egalitarian redistribution, and his policies (such as welfare-to-work and the tackling of ‘failing’ schools and poor literacy) are not geared to equal opportunities, but to minimum opportunities for those currently excluded from them. Of course if the socially excluded are granted minimum opportunities this puts them on a more equal footing with others. But beyond that equality is not promoted and the main dynamic is inclusion and minimum opportunities rather than egalitarian redistribution. After that baseline has been achieved it is not clear that more equal outcomes or even the equalisation of opportunities is on the government’s agenda."

That does not offer very much for those people living in the regions who have been excluded from the benefits of economic growth of the last decade. They are helped very little in terms of public education, skilled employment and the provision of health and telecommunication services.

Another transformation of the end of social democracy is community. Martell says:


"As such, the oft-spoken value of community also refers to a more inclusive community rather than a more equal one. It does not mean class community or the socio-economic community of old social democracy which was to be built by measures such as redistribution and common experiences of universal health care and comprehensive education. It refers to moral community with the emphasis on the responsibilities of individual citizens to the state rather than of business to the community, a more old social democratic conception, even if it was not often pursued right down to the hilt in practice."

Latham calls this tough love and it takes over the old Robert Menzies Liberal tradition of the moral citizen.

Other values that would be transformed are those associated with the role of active government in a market economy (eg. a rejection of direct interventionist sort advocated by traditional social democracy); the replacement of social liberalism's self-development of the person ethics by a crude utilitarianism; and a replacement of welfare programs with law and order.

Do we end up with Thatcherism with a human face?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:30 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
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