Does social democracy have a future? An exchange.
| Author | O'Neill, Martin |
| Position | DEBATE |
From: Martin O'Neill
To : Neal Lawson
Dear Neal,
Right-wingers have long been sceptical about the role for the state, and have often attacked social democracy for giving the state too great a role in our lives. It's easy to see why those who want to give free rein to the unbridled market and who could not care less about growing inequalities want both to attack the role of the state and to profess the demise of social democracy. What seems like a curious development is that we are now hearing similar things from writers who identify with the left.
John Harris, in a recent piece in Prospect magazine, takes Ed Miliband's Labour Party to task for concentrating on policies--such as the abolition of the bedroom tax, the banning of zero-hour contracts, and the introduction of a mansion tax--that rely on 'an enduring belief in the capture of the centralised state', chiding the British left for being 'still wedded to a dreamy yearning for some crude replay of Clement Attlee's reforming Labour government of 1945-51' (Harris, 2014). Despite the fact that Compass, the campaigning organisation which you have chaired for the past decade and on whose management committee I have previously served, is itself committed to a number of plausible and attractive policies that one might describe as essentially 'statist'--from the nationalisation of the railways, to the more aggressive regulation of banking and finance, and the restriction of runaway executive pay--your own recent writing, and in particular your New Statesman piece which claims that 'social democrats face irrelevance at best, extinction at worst' (Lawson, 2014) has some close affinities with the perplexing position staked out by John Harris.
My own sense is that both you and Harris have committed an understandable but regrettable mistake; I think you've moved from a plausible critique of some things that New Labour did wrong--being too remote or technocratic or managerialist, and not paying sufficient attention to the values of participation and democracy --but you've then over-generalised from those more limited points to an exaggerated and puzzling critique of statist social democracy in general. You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and, as anyone with young children will tell you, that isn't a costless mistake to make. The positions that you and Harris are advocating--which are in some respects curiously reminiscent of David Cameron's 'Big Society' and of the Big Society's paper-thin and implausible theoretical foundations in Phillip Blond's 'Red Toryism' (see Blond, 2010)--are liable to have the effect of sapping Labour of the clarity of vision it needs for its next period in government and could, if given too much credence, undermine the real opportunity that the next Labour government has to create a much more egalitarian and democratic political economy in this country. If Labour is to succeed in the challenge that Ed Miliband has laid down to create a more equal society (see, for example, Ferguson and Miliband, 2014; Eaton and Wood, 2014; Wood, 2012), then it needs to be unembarrassed and forthright in using all the available levers of the British state to create a better society. Here I couldn't agree more with an observation of Chris Mullin's--it is often the right that does best at exercising power without apology, and this is a lesson that the left needs to learn (Mullin, 2013). The next Labour government will need to overcome the party's traditional timidity in acting resolutely to change the shape of the economy; the task at hand should be the important business of finding ways to use the power that the state possesses to create a country fit for its citizens, in which avoidable suffering is reduced, runway inequality is curtailed, and the lives of the disadvantaged are significantly improved.
That's the general shape of our disagreement. Now, I don't think that you're wrong about the difficulties--generated by globalisation and political disaffiliation--that the left faces, but I do think you're wrong on the nature of the response that the left should make to these problems. You identify three 'challenges' to which the left must respond--these are a challenge 'to redefine the meaning of a good society', the challenge of internationalism, and what you describe as a 'cultural challenge' whereby 'social democrats are going to have to let go', to 'create platforms so that people can collectively change things for themselves' instead of 'pulling policy levers'.
Let me take these in turn. On the first, your call for a 'post-materialist' conception of the good is troubling in two ways. First, in a massively pluralistic society, in which people have a plethora of different values, I do not think it is any job of politicians or political parties to tell people what their conception of the good life should be like, or to chide them for their materialism. Unlike you, I don't think there is anything wrong with working people having a nice television. Second, in an era where hundreds of thousands of people are reliant on food banks in order to avoid seeing their families starving, the idea that we have reached a period of 'post-materialist' politics beggars belief. Millions of our fellow citizens are in real material need, and it is one crucial job of politics to address those needs. I'm sure we don't in fact disagree on that point.
On your remarks about internationalism, I fully agree that more needs to be done to stop the 'race to the bottom' of fiscal competition. You are right that it would be a good start if there were European harmonisation of corporate taxation rules, and more collaboration between international fiscal authorities. But note that these are recommendations about what ministers should do when they are in power. Rather than showing that statist social democracy is irrelevant, this challenge shows that collaboration between strong democratic states, each committed to taming and humanising the market, is a precondition for creating more liveable societies.
Your third point, about the need for politicians to 'let go' and give up on the idea of wielding power for the benefit of citizens, gets to the core of our disagreement. You think that the days of statist social democracy belong in the dustbin of history, and that the politics of the future is diffuse, decentralised and horizontal. But the decline of the state has been massively overplayed. What happened after the financial crisis? Neo-liberal states roared into life, spending hundreds of billions of pounds (and trillions of dollars) to save the financial system. As Will Davies nicely puts it, the financial crisis showed us that, despite neo-liberal avowals to the contrary, the 'all-powerful sovereign state... had been hovering in the background all along' (Davies, 2014). Since the start of the financial crisis, the Bank of England has printed around [pounds sterling]300 billion through its programme of quantitative easing, pumped directly through the veins of the diseased institutions that created the crisis in the first place, and which has ended up in the pockets of plutocrats, massively inflating the prices of the assets held by the financial elite at just the very moment that the poor are being subject to a campaign of austerity. Instead, what the left needs to do is to explain how that extraordinary level of power can be deployed for radical and egalitarian ends (see, e.g., Guinan, 2014). As it is, that power is too often used to enrich those who are already grotesquely rich, while keeping the carcass of neoliberalism alive.
In your New Statesman essay, you say that 'the way in which public finances have been used to bail out the banks at the expense of the people who are capitalism's victims, proves the paucity of the social democrat position'. That is a non sequitur. We have not seen a social democratic response to the financial crisis, only an essentially neo-liberal one. That neo-liberal response showed how the power of the state could be deployed to reshape the economy, but it was not a deployment that was designed to help ordinary people. The inadequate response to the financial crisis shows the need for social democratic solutions, and the power of the state to enact them; it shows not that social democracy was tried and found wanting, but that it is badly needed, as much or even more than ever before.
It is the state--not 'horizontal' networks communicating via social media--that could restructure property or land taxation; or which could bring in a citizens' basic income of the kind envisaged by Philippe Van Parijs or a basic capital holding of the sort endorsed by James Meade (see Van Parijs, 1997; Meade, 1964); which could transform our political economy through regional banks and a new approach to corporate taxation and corporate governance (see, e.g. O'Neill and Williamson, 2012a). It's the state that could transform the plight of families through universal childcare or through Nordic-type regulation of parental leave. If we're even to begin to think about the comprehensive overhaul of the fiscal system that Piketty has argued is a precondition for preventing a slide into a new and crueller level of inequality, what will be needed is for parties of the left to harness the full powers of the...
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