|
January 10, 2007
To counter the tendency of Australian Libertarians and classical liberals to downplay the political and democracy in favour of economics and the market, we can pick up on an article in the Australian Financial Review (5th January) by John Quiggin and Henry Farrell. The article is built around a review of Sheri Berman's The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century.
Berman's text, which works in the tradition of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, looks at the history of social democracy from its origins in the late nineteenth century to today. It argues that soical democracy how it beat out competitors such as classical liberalism, orthodox Marxism, and its cousins, Fascism and National Socialism by solving the central challenge of modern politics - reconciling the competing needs of capitalism and democracy. The review is not online as far as I know, but it has its genesis in a seminar on the Primacy of Politics in 2006, and which has been usefully documented by Henry Farrell.
In his contribution to the seminar Heny Farrell interprets Polanyi's argument to be one:
...on how “society” reacts defensively to the depredations of the free market and its relentless commodification of social relationships. Thus, Polanyi’s famous account of the ‘double movement’ in which the excesses of the market inspire a counter-reaction from society. Under this account, socialism and fascism are related; they are different ways in which society has sought to protect itself from the market. The one is a benign effort to restrain the excesses of the market, the other a malign tendency to protect society at the expense of human freedom.
He adds that Polanyi's causal account of how market excesses provoke a response from society is at best a little hazy, and at worst a theory that doesn’t explain the real choices made by human agents. He traces how Berman both deepens and revises Polanyi’s account by emphasizing how ideas shaped how different individuals, and the political parties that those individuals worked through responded to capitalism’s internal crisis. Berman suggests that social democracy was more than a set of policies, or a compromise between Marxism and liberalism; it was an ideology all on its own. Farrell adds that:
While she doesn’t say it explicitly, her argument suggests that social democrats are really closet Polanyians, concerned to prevent society from being gutted by the market, and imposing the necessary constraints to prevent this from happening. This also makes Berman believe that social democracy is newly relevant today. As in the 1920’s, markets are regarded as all-powerful, and people don’t seem to like it very much. There’s a clear opportunity for social democrats to come to the fore again, by stressing the need to protect community, using markets for their clear economic benefits, while protecting citizens from their worst depredations. Markets should be expanded, but they also should be managed.
Isn't this what the Rudd ALP beginning to address in Australia? Rudd is talking in terms of the battle of ideas, utilizes David McKnight's book Beyond Left and Right. Rudd places himself within the social democratic tradition of the ALP in Australia rather than Europe; one, as John Quiggin rightly points out, has its roots in the Great Depression. He says that Berman’s argument is that:
Marxist dogmatism prevented most European socialist parties from providing any policy response to the Depression, the big exception being the Swedish Social Democrats. A look at the experience of the English-speaking countries suggests some grounds for scepticism....A possible alternative analysis, then, is that the Depression created conditions under which a social-democratic response could be put forward, but that this was not a real political possibility until the bankruptcy of orthodox finance had become fully evident.
It is one challenged by the Communist Party on the Left about subordinating markets to politics and the anti-communist Christians from the Right trying to protect the fabric of society (community).
Rudd's argument is that social democracy is relevant today as a counter response to neo-liberalism's emphasis on free markets::
Neo-liberals speak of the self-regarding values of security, liberty and property. To these, social democrats would add the other-regarding values of equity, solidarity and sustainability. For social democrats, these additional values are seen as mutually reinforcing because the allocation of resources in pursuit of equity (particularly through education), solidarity and sustainability assist in creating the human, social and environmental capital necessary to make a market economy function effectively.Working within a comprehensive social-democratic framework of self-regarding and other-regarding values gives social democrats a rich policy terrain in which to define a role for the state. This concept of the state had its origins in the view that markets are designed for human beings, not vice versa, and this remains the fundamental premise that separates social democrats from neo-liberals.
Rudd's social democratic response to neo-liberalism and the laissez-faire economists is from with liberalism--it is a social liberalism--and, as Mark Bahnisch has pointed out over at Larvatus Prodeo, Rudd has made a start in making the case for a revivified social democracy.
|
|
