Social Democracy Now

I recently was forwarded a report on the open seminar on Attac's status and future, which was organised during the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre last January. Attac and the World Social Forum play an invaluable role in educating people about the evils of neoliberalism and encouraging people to think about alternatives to the status quo. That said, they do seem to have degenerated very quickly into a fairly pointless gropefest - by which I mean a festival where people grope around in the dark for something better than what they know and the only concrete outcome is the decision to get together to do it all again sometime.

Personally, I find it a bit depressing to realize that Attac/the WSF is still 'searching' for alternatives to neoliberalism. Not only does 'searching' involve wasting valuable time which allows the neoliberal order to further entrench itself, it involves trying to reinvent the wheel. So far as I can see, the best alternative to neoliberalism is the best model available, which is Scandinavian-style social democracy (especially in its pre-downsized form). What's more, we know it's possible because it actually exists and reproduces itself extremely successfully.

Of course, I would not go so far as to claim that social democracy was the last word in human social organization, so would not want to suggest that there would be anything illegitimate about endorsing other alternatives to neoliberalism, e.g., Parecon. But it seems to me that the time to start a conversation about going beyond capitalism altogether is when the neoliberal state has been supplanted by social democracy. I often ask myself, Why isn't Attac/the WSF reminding people that solid alternatives to neoliberalism already exist? Ones that work, are compatible with historically high standards of living, historically low poverty rates, nearly full employment, freedom of speech, gender equality, democracy and human rights?

Sometimes I think the rhetoric of Attac/the WSF, which seems to be about how we all need to get together to grope about for alternatives to neoliberalism, is the surest possible way to postpone neoliberalism's demise indefinitely. Or, to sound conspiratorial for a moment, could this be Attac/the WSF's true function? It is not inconceivable that Attac and the WSF are meant to be a maze without an exit. 

What it comes down to is this: are people serious about displacing neoliberalism? Or are they only interested in starting an interminable, inconsequential conversation about unattainable perfection? The latter, it seems to me, is precisely what neoliberals would love the left to get bogged down in.

BELOW: WHICH WORLD IS POSSIBLE AGAIN?

 

In a world confronting a quite possibly lethal dose of American rightwing madness, it's almost always a relief to turn to Canada, where sanity does more than survive in scant pockets. Among Canada's many treasures are its anti-globalization and anti-privatization activists, including one of my personal heroes, Maude Barlow, whose writings, among them the book Blue Gold (co-authored with Tony Clarke), are a wonderful resource for those of us who are trying to educate people about the all-important issue of water privatization. But a no less impressive anti-privatization voice is that of educator Heather-jane Robertson, who epitomizes sweet reasonableness in a marvellous one-hour talk she gave to the British Columbia Teachers' Federation's Public Education NOT FOR SALE conference in Vancouver in February 2005. (You can download the talk in a variety of formats, audio and video, here.) Among the most interesting parts of her talk comes towards the conclusion, when she refers to a recent article entitled Teaching Against Idiocy. She explains that, according to this article, the word idiot derives from the Greek word idios, which refers not to someone who is stupid so much as someone whose mental horizons consist only of their petty personal concerns. For the Greeks, the person who was not concerned with communal interests (and therefore the political) was, quite simply, an idiot. This part of her talk helped clarify for me the nature of my own teaching praxis, which is essentially about trying to turn idiots into citizens. It seems to me that there will be no revival of social democracy on a significant scale until young people tune out of the mass media, which is trying to reduce them to idiots, and embrace communal concerns. Teachers can help them do this a thousand different ways, and I am sure that most of us are at least trying to combat idiocy - which, I'm sure, is one of the main reasons the rightwing wants to see education privatized in the first place.

POSTSCRIPT: 'Teaching Against Idiocy' was written by Walter C. Parker, was published in Phi Delta Kappan in January 2005, and is available online here. (Do read it, it's wonderful.) A 2001 talk by Heather-jane Robertson on education privatization is available here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Someone who gets what privatization is really all about. The 'strategic objective of those who would “Starve the Beast”, writes The Black Commentator, 'poison the fiscal well with deficits and tax cuts until the federal government cannot deliver popularly desired political goods such as health care, much less help the states and cities provide basic services. Corporations then step into the void – or as much of the needs-market as is profitable – to sell vital services.'

As a social democrat, I am reasonably partial to President Kennedy who was, as a liberal with a social conscience, the closest thing to a social democrat who has yet inhabited the White House. A continuing source of annoyance to me is the debate which continues to fester over whether or not he planned to withdraw from Vietnam. The evidence, in fact, is abundant, that that is precisely what he wanted to do. Numerous individuals who had discussed Vietnam with Kennedy, including Kenny O'Donnell, Evelyn Lincoln, Canadian PM Lester Pearson, Senator Mike Mansfield and others, state quite explicitly that he mentioned to them his intention to withdraw from Vietnam once the 1964 election was behind him. Yet in Blackwell's Companion to the Vietnam War, Edwin E. Moise rejects this view on the basis of Kennedy's public statements. It is astonishing but true that Moise rejects the considerable amount of evidence that reveals JFK's actual intentions on the basis of statements in which he was - like all politicians - trying only not to give his enemies any ammunition to use against him, at least before he was re-elected. It seems to me that in regards to such a sensitive matter his private statements yield far greater insight into his intentions that do his public utterances.

Yet so anti-JFK is the tenor of academia today that public utterances take priority over what he said in private. Indeed, Moise goes so far as to reject O'Donnell's version of JFK's words for no other reason than that he finds them 'hard to believe.' Personally, I find a lot of things in history books 'hard to believe' but I certainly am not entitled to reject them on that account. It's amazing these days how many academics are resorting to insinuation, character assassination and other CIA-type techniques to discredit Kennedy. Why, over forty years later, is it still necessary to persuade the public to believe that JFK was a sexmad male chauvinist pig who accomplished nothing and stood for nothing?

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Michael Morrissey: 'The biggest lie of our time, after the Warren Report, is the notion that Johnson merely continued or expanded Kennedy's policy in Vietnam after the assassination.'

BELOW: President Kennedy, the last decent human being in the White House:

Joseph Stiglitz complained the other day that Bush's decision to appoint the godawful Paul Wolfowitz to the presidency of the World Bank will provoke worldwide outrage against the Bank. Funnily enough, he says this as if it would be a bad thing. I must be one of the few people who think that a Wolfowitz presidency of the World Bank is in fact a good thing because a worldwide backlash against the Bank would be a very good thing. If a relative unknown or someone who could be taken seriously was named to head the World Bank, it would be much harder for people in the developed world and on the less well informed fringes of the social movements to get the message that it is nothing more than an instrument of American imperialism. With Wolfowitz at the head, this fact will be blindingly obvious. In other words, this will spare all of us on the left the effort of persuading people that the Bank is an instrument of American imperialism. Bush has therefore done our work for us. He has discredited the Bank in a single stroke - accomplishing overnight something political activists have been been struggling to do for years.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Mark Weisbrot: 'Here in Washington, there is a deep sense of dread and malaise among World Bank staff. Naturally they do not want to be seen as just another instrument of U.S. foreign policy. But most people are not aware how much the World Bank already plays that role.'

BELOW: Wolfie on the rampage, taken from here

UPDATE: I see George Monbiot took the same view on Wolfowitz's nomination in an April 5, 2005 column. Glad to have anticipated one of my favourite commentators by nearly two weeks!

Finding the words with which to start a new blog is fairly easy. Since the Web is already saturated with blogs, it's unlikely that more than a few people will ever read this one anyway - which rather helps reduce the stress factor. However, for the handful who have somehow managed to penetrate this tiny corner of cyberspace, a few words of introduction are required. This website is something which, so far as I am aware, simply does not exist anywhere else on the Net: a blog that presents news and opinion from an authentically social democratic viewpoint.

It would probably not be going too far to suggest that most people today have very little idea what social democracy means. This is because the modern political galaxy is thickly populated by pseudo-social democrats, including most notably Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and their fellow New Labour hoaxers in the U.K., as well as the Schroeder-Fischer gang in Germany, whose negligible differences from conservatives parties have engendered extensive confusion as to whether, once it has embraced the 'golden straitjacket' of economic orthodoxy, social democracy possesses any substantive content whatsoever. Any genuine social democrat would be appalled by the discredit these so-called 'Third Way' social democrats have brought upon social democracy itself. Since they are in reality neoliberals who occasionally spout social democratic rhetoric as a cynical means of building consensus for neoliberal policies, they are symptoms of the complete and utter bankruptcy of the organized social democratic parties. The social democratic cause would, in fact, only be advanced if these moribund and long-subverted organizations simply shut up shop. They no longer stand for anything, and the world would be a far better place without their continuing obfuscation of class politics.

Closing down the social democratic parties would lead to a renewal of authentic social democracy. Fortunately, there exists a solid basis for such a renewal: social democracy lingers on in many countries as the common sense of the politically- and economically-literate citizen. This blog aims to contribute to such a process of renewal by presenting authentic social democratic opinion as a contrast to the fakes who populate the upper hierarchy of the organized social democratic parties, with the possible exception of Sweden, where it is not clear to me whether the social democratic party has yet been fully subverted.

Given that it is no longer self-evident what social democracy means, readers will probably want to know what I mean by the phrase. Probably the best short answer is that social democracy inhabits the middle ground between ideological attachment to the 'free market,' on one hand, and the market-free economy on the other. While authentic social democrats rightly reject the free market, they harbour no illusions about the state's ability to direct economic production. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, they are apostles rather of a 'third way' between laissez-faire capitalism and state capitalism - but this via media should not be confused with the Clinton/Blair/Schroeder Third Way, which is simply a neoliberal scam. (At least part of the aim of this blog is to show how very remote these frauds are from authentic social democracy.)

The view taken here is that the social democratic via media is best exemplified by the Swedish welfare state. Unlike the straw man imagined by many of its critics, the social democratic welfare state is far from being, or having ever been, irrational state largesse to those they would stigmatize as 'undeserving.' It is, in fact, a profoundly constructive creation in which social goods which cannot be provided fairly and efficiently by the market economy are provided by the state, financed from general taxation. Any retrenchment of the welfare state, accordingly, amounts to a direct attack on social democracy. Those who claim to be social democrats who talk about welfare 'reform' are nothing but liars. They are in truth neoliberals exploiting the rhetoric of progress to reconcile voters to their real agenda, which involves radically reducing the share of government revenues which are returned to taxpayers in the form of collective services. Their aim is not to reduce government spending and thereby taxes, which is the result most voters probably anticipate when they hear talk of trimming social spending, but to direct a larger proportion of government revenues to their relatives and cronies in business.

There are, in fact, many encouraging signs that voters in the advanced capitalist countries are ready for authentic social democracy. Over and over, opinion polls show that, however much people might want tax cuts, what they need are better government services. (As the standard of living erodes under neoliberalism, people seem to be becoming more inclined to think about what they need rather than what they want.) At the moment, the major political parties are not prepared to acknowledge that fact, which profoundly unsettles their impoverished, rightwing thinktank view of human nature. But a revival of social democracy will ensure that they will.