If social democracy in government (contemporary social democracy is a governmental force even when it is not in government) shelters behind the constraints, both national and international, on economic and social administration, what can we expect of the ‘other left’? In the first instance, the ‘social’ left represented by the trade unions, long-time partners in the social-democratic enterprise? Then the ‘radical’ left (communist, post-communist, Red-Green, or ecological)? Or even of Europe and the Party of European Socialists (PES)? What could contribute to establishing a political alternative to neoliberalism? To what extent, and how? And in what conceivable framework? For this alternative – or its impossibility – forms part, even in its absence, of contemporary social democracy. Paraphrasing Jacques Attali, we might say that to ‘identify the place’ of social democracy is not only to ‘confer a meaning on the place it occupies’, but also – and possibly primarily – to divine the meaning of the ‘place’ it does not occupy.
The Low Horizons of the Trade Unions
The trade unions have been weakened, but they are not moribund – far from it. ‘The weakening of the trade-union movement in the 1980s and 1990s’, Göran Therborn has written, ‘has not transformed West European unions into mere clones of their American or Japanese cousins.’1 And with the exception of the United States and Great Britain, where we see ‘broad and conclusive evidence of a dramatic decline in the influence of unions’, in the majority of countries ‘unions have retained most of the institutionally based capacities for the defense of worker interests that they had prior to the 1980s’, despite a reduction (which is not, however, general) in union density.2 Thus, if unions are not as weak as is commonly argued, it remains true that the sphere of trade-union influence (and I am not referring to institutional influence here) is dwindling even where union numbers remain significant, or are even on the increase. Trade-unionism is no longer – or rather, to avoid idealizing the past and minimizing the effects of the present, is less of – an influential and self-confident force than it was in the past. Trade-unionism has become weaker. Increasingly, it is an institutional interest group, a ‘service’ organization – and less and less of a movement.3 Not that this in any way prevents ‘micro-conflictuality’ at enterprise level, or ‘incessant guerrilla warfare opposing union forces and management’.4
This ‘guerrilla warfare’ must not, however, be allowed to mask the decline in the strength and role of unions, particularly within the individual firm. The weakening of the ‘voice mechanisms’5 represented by workers’ collectives at the workplace (works councils and trade-union groups) is something that affects the daily life of working-class wage-earners. The emergence and consolidation of capitalist sectors that are non-unionized, or barely unionized – the diffusion, in a sense, of a tradition of non-trade-unionism – is a far from negligible economic, social and cultural reality, even in the economies of institutionalized-organized capitalism. The ‘trade-union deserts’ (Bernard Thibault) are difficult to repopulate at a time when workers are sceptical, mistrustful or disheartened, and employers are arrogant and aggressive. As Jelle Visser has stressed: ‘some unions may even grow larger and stronger than ever before. However, we can be less confident that encompassing union movements – as we have known them for much of the past century in the democratic part of Europe – will make it into the next century.’6 This development is already creating an uncontrolled and uncontrollable process of micro-deregulation, analogous to that of the United States or a large number of firms in southern Europe; in future, it could encourage it further.
Faced with this danger, unions have more to gain than lose from a ‘political’ strategy, a strategy of intervention at the central-national level, even at the European level. In a defensive period they even have an interest in using the ‘ideology of the national interest’, which can be articulated only at the central political level (see Chapter 5), against the ideology of the market favoured by ‘sectional’ capitalist interests today. And this is all the more true in that the traditional strike weapon, while it is very effective in a phase of expansion (considerably more so in corporatist than non-corporatist countries), is much less so in periods of crisis.7 Thus, in the current environment the unions’ abandonment of a ‘national’ strategy in favour of a ‘decentralized’ or ‘local’ strategy could turn out to be a miscalculation. As Paul Boreham and Richard Hall have written:
To advocate such a strategy is to misread the nature of the power relations between labour and capital at the level of the enterprise and the economy as a whole. It is to consign the union movement to the conflict with capital at the weakest point – the workplace itself – where workers are subject to the power of a jealously guarded managerial prerogative and are susceptible to the appeal of the possibility of a sheltered, core-status job.8
To implement a political-national strategy, the unions need – today possibly more than ever – a fairly well-disposed ‘third party’, which involves preserving (in some way, at least) the link with the social-democratic parties. Obviously, the neoliberal policies implemented by social-democratic governments demonstrate that unions cannot passively await salvation from the election of friendly governments. They thus have an interest in not identifying too closely with their traditional partner. The socialist parties, for their part, have an even greater interest in not identifying too closely with the world of trade-unionism, and in freeing themselves from the overly close embrace of a burdensome ally. And this is what they have done virtually throughout Europe. In a social context in which trade-union and working-class centrality have been put in question, the importance to the social-democratic parties of the ‘organic’ link with the trade-union world has diminished dramatically. No ‘catch-all entrepreneurial organization’ would build its strategy and political future on the privileged, exclusive base of the working-class group. This explains why an ongoing relaxation of former attachments is the rule, with each actor encroaching minimally on the territory of the other in the framework of a co-operation that is now fluctuating, unstable, and often conflictual.
But socialists/social-democrats know full well that they cannot govern effectively for long against the trade unions. They also know that preservation of their union influence is a factor of electoral stabilization, particularly in countries where populist poles of the right or the extreme right threaten to entrench themselves enduringly among some sections of popular strata. In reality, parties and unions have an interest in a greater freedom of action, but at the same time both have an interest in renewing, on condition of a redefinition, the terms of a political contract that is more than a century old. This is why the umbilical cord has not been severed, even if it does not possess the content, the strength and vitality of yesteryear.
Thus, despite their weakening, unions wield power, and that power is not insignificant. If they were able to attenuate the new neoliberal orientation of social-democratic programmatic documents in the 1980s (see Part II), they are still inclined to ‘push’ social democracy in a less neoliberal direction. The unions constitute an ‘external’ and, in part, an ‘internal’ buffer which, although it is much more peripheral than in the past, restricts the social democrats freedom to pursue their strategy and vocation. After all, unions are often the last refuge of a social-democratic ideology abandoned by social democracy itself. And in particular, they are always capable of bouncing back and asserting themselves as central actors on the social scene, as was demonstrated by the impressive French trade-union movement of December 1995,9 or the major mobilization of the Danish union base in April-May 1998. The capacity for action of the ‘organized wage-earning masses’ is thus not a hollow concept.10 Unions will always be inclined to push social democracy in a less pro-capitalist direction, making it more ‘open’ and more ‘sensitive’ to the interests of waged labour.
But will this influence be such as to encourage a radical reorientation of current social-democratic politics? Will it be of a kind to rekindle the passion for ‘that part of liberty which we call equality’, as Heine termed it?11
Profound economic and social changes in advanced capitalism have not only weakened trade-unionism, but have also challenged a historically important aspect of union presence and activity: unions are much less potential sites and arenas for criticism of, and opposition to, capitalism than they were in the past (though trade-union anti-capitalism was a very complex and ambiguous phenomenon). The unions’ present goal is largely defensive: to inflect the economic and social policies of incumbent governments. The objective of social transformation has been renounced, despite the resurgence here and there of ‘centres’ with an alternative culture. The unions are no longer tempted or obliged to articulate ‘a language of principles and solutions’ transcending the horizon of capitalist society, if only on the rhetorical level.12 Abandonment of anti-capitalism, whether rhetorical or real, definitely does not mean renunciation of a whole culture of social critique, of which trade-unionism was historically a vehicle. But potential trade-union influence on social-democratic parties is not deployed, and will not be deployed (at least in the near future), in a radically anti-capitalist or ‘socialist’ direction, whatever content we attribute to the latter term. Worse still: trade unions’ ‘programmatic appeal’ does not even outline an attractive socioeconomic prospect in the framework of capitalism, one that might have a good chance of attracting the attention of social-democratic strategists. In reality, the trade-union world is less capable than it once was of inspiring original ideas and new practices on the political level.
In addition, profound changes in the productive fabric and the current of ambient individualism have largely swept away not only the anti-capitalist vocation, but also the traditional and often ‘communitarian’ collectivism, of trade-union institutions. Trade-union action today is only in the second instance a means of asserting identity and global rejection of the enemy. Contemporary solidarities – ‘social struggles’, as they are called – derive less from any homogeneity of interests and tradition (based on communal existence) than from a concrete, temporary convergence around certain mobilizing themes. More so than in the past, the new solidarities are specialized in character and objective, and frequently ad hoc. Their character is somewhat makeshift and transient.13 The enormous difficulty involved in maintaining the new networks of solidarity and action created during the impressive strikes by British miners (1984–85) and French workers (December 1995) is indicative of this. This does not mean that the influence of ‘social struggles’ on the left’s programmatic options is negligible. The impact of the December 1995 mobilization on the French left, and even beyond, is tangible proof. But it could mean – and this is a hypothesis awaiting confirmation – that their impact can be momentarily strong, but not really profound: incapable of informing socialists’ programmatic posture and governmental practice in anything other than circumstantial or electoral fashion.
Having preserved most of their ‘institutionally based capacities’, but losing momentum and more divided than ever, unions remain the principal representatives – and interlocutors – created by the world of wage-labour. This world is certainly very heterogeneous, but in its majority it remains orientated towards egalitarian values and the state. This cannot be ignored by any party of the left, be it socialist, communist, post-communist, or whatever. If it ignores it, it does so at its political and electoral peril. But the trade unions do not have the ideas, the cohesion, the will, nor, in the end, the strength to push social democracy towards a fundamentally different politics.
The Pink, the Red and the Green: ‘Disaffected’ Liberals and ‘Disaffected’ Social Democrats
With the onset of the 1950s, a period of routinization set in for socialists and social democrats, marked by an absence of new, mobilizing projects and an impoverishment of thought and internal debates. Only with the 1960s, in a new international context and with the arrival of new generations and ideas, did European socialism rediscover some of its internal intellectual vitality.14 Even then, as Donald Sassoon has stressed:
socialist parties were doomed to be taken by surprise by all the changes which modernity thrust upon them over the following thirty years: the permissive society, pop culture, feminism, black consciousness, homosexual rights, the plight of the Third World, ecology, the end of ideology, European integration, the revival of ideology, the crisis of the family, the end of communism in Eastern Europe, the growth of nationalist separatism. Not one novelty worth writing or thinking about had been envisioned or predicted by the European socialist movement.15
Indeed, social-democratic renewal was the product of pragmatic adaptation to social, economic and cultural evolution. Moreover, it came, for the most part, from outside: social movements, old and new, the new left, ecological networks and parties, the new right. Social democracy ‘pirated’ ideas that were developed outside it, and often against it.
But could the ‘creative radicalism’ (to use Geoff Eley’s phrase)16 of the new social movements and the ‘new politics’ oppositions, the more traditional radicalism of some (not all) communist parties or parties of a communist origin, as well as the trade unions’ natural vocation to defend an economic policy favourable to the world of wage-labour – could these become the vectors (or rather, the joint vectors) of a ‘new vitalizing vision’, either in co-operation with social democracy (where the electoral arithmetic permits or prescribes it), or against it?17 Might they, perhaps, contribute involuntarily to making it possible to ‘safeguard’ (to use Mario Telo’s term) the identity of the social-democratic actor once again? For such a safeguard, bound up with the ‘coherence’ between the currently proclaimed identity of social democracy and its past economic and social options – a coherence that is today on the verge of rupture – is the issue that implicitly confronts the new social democracy.
Today, it is beyond dispute that in the majority of cases the presence of ‘radical’ poles, old and new, is conducive to a more audacious, more imaginative, and sometimes less pro-capitalist politics in several spheres (economic policy, unemployment, the environment, the construction of the EU, relations between the sexes, minority rights, cultural liberalism in general). It simultaneously constitutes a kind of ‘external’ obstacle and ideological-political stimulus. The function of these poles is on the one hand to ‘correct’ and ‘moderate’ the revisionist ardour of social-democratic leaders, and on the other to act as a laboratory of ideas.18
More specifically, the new social movements ‘have put new issues on the political agenda [and] provided the recruiting ground for a new political elite, in particular for a new elite on the left’.19 Together with the ‘old’ poles and the trade unions, the ‘new’ poles, which derive from the arena of ‘movement politics’, have contributed to a certain ‘ventilation’ of the social-democratic project and its governmental practice. We have seen tangible signs of this in the experiences of the gauche plurielle in France and the SPD-Green coalition in Germany. In a seeming paradox, rivals to the left of social democracy contribute to the promotion of a politics that is closer to specifically social-democratic declarations and objectives.
But be careful! The parties that occupy either the space to the left of social democracy, or the space of the ‘new politics’, or both at once, are profoundly different from the former communist oppositions. As a general rule, formations to the left of social democracy lack strong organizational structure, a compact class ‘infrastructure’, and coherent programmes. This is true in particular of the ‘green’ parties. Often built as the political expression of the new social movements, the Green parties, although they often claim to be a party-movement, do not possess a solidity equivalent to that conferred on the old social-democratic and communist parties by the communitarian and ‘solidaristic’ fabric of the working-class movement. Despite some far from convincing assertions, they are not constructed as ‘parties of identity’. Moreover, the socially and culturally very heteroclite strata they represent, which are often very individualist, are not distinguished by a common mode of life based on collective – and collectively shared – values. It is scarcely surprising, then, if their ‘anti-systemic’ tendency has proved fragile, and if the rhythm of their ‘absorption’ into the system is exceptionally rapid. In fact, today everything suggests that the ethic of compromise, which coexists with an ethic of rupture in the Green parties, is prevailing.20 The discourse of Green dissidence (or ‘desubordination’, to employ Ralph Miliband’s term) has not had the depth of the communist anti-systemic discourse of the past – a discourse which Michel Hastings has characterized as a ‘discourse of scission’. In addition, the ecological parties lack a stable electorate. A large share of Green electoral support comes from urban and middle-class categories. These voters are ‘volatile’, often register a ‘protest’ vote, and are very sensitive to electoral appeals and the circumstances of party competition. All of this weakens the position of the ecological formations, limiting their potential for electoral expansion as well as their potential for political pressure.
And the communists? Communists are ‘disaffected social democrats’!21 This thesis of the Belgian socialist Henri de Man was profoundly unjust to the communist movement in the 1930s and its radical struggle for an egalitarian socialist society. Today, it is not very far from the truth. Robert Hue, PCF leader, could still declare, during the 1999 Fete de l’Humanité: ‘I challenge any party to assemble so many people. The Communist Party is alive and well!’22 But notwithstanding the message delivered by the national secretary of the French communists, the PCF, like the other communist or post-communist parties, is no longer a guide and model – either as regards structure and organizational coherence, or when it comes to the representation of popular classes. In reality, the field of divergences within the traditional left has diminished significantly. According to Donald Sassoon, ‘less than a decade after the collapse of the communist system, the European left … has adopted a language and tone that possesses a cohesion it has never before achieved in its history’.23 The combined effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall and globalization, real or perceived, have contributed to delegitimating the radical anti-capitalist politics – or systematic oppositional stance – of the communist parties, the extreme left, or some left-wing fringes within social democracy or close to it.24 In fact, a large number of communist parties (not all), and all the small or medium-sized post-communist parties, have gradually inflected their discourse in a less ‘anti-systemic’ direction, and are progressively donning (as Alain Duhamel would have it) the new clothes of ‘social reformism’.25
To summarize (and generalize), we are witnessing a dual convergence in the spaces of national competition:
| (i) | Organizationally and ideologically more polymorphous and diverse than ever, the forces to the left of social democracy are converging. The communists and post-communists are abandoning their radical anti-capitalist project, and becoming a shade more ‘new politics’; while the properly ‘new politics’ formations are, in their turn, becoming much less ‘anti-systemic’ and a little more ‘left-wing’ (in the sense that they accord greater importance to socioeconomic themes). |
| (ii) | Having in their great majority renounced, or being in the process of renouncing, their anti-systemic vocation, these peripheral oppositions are converging with social democracy, which for its part, in adopting a more ‘new politics’ profile, feels closer to them.26 |
Thus, without always openly acknowledging it, the Red, Red-Green, or Green oppositions are metamorphosing. Far removed from certain ‘hard’ communist parties of the past, the majority of these parties convey the reassuring impression of a force of peaceful protest, flexibly assimilated into the ‘system’ and flexibly opposed to it. After the fashion of the German and French Greens, they are, in addition, becoming ‘national players’.27 To generalize Alain Duhamel’s observation about the PCF, this is ‘the hidden metamorphosis’.28
With this dual convergence and metamorphosis, a new dialectic of competition and reconciliation is set in train on the left and centre-left of the party-political spectrum. Socialists and ‘oppositional reformists’ are ideologically more complementary than competitive, while remaining electorally more competitive than complementary. A displacement of roles is under way in most of Europe’s party systems: to stick with Henri de Man’s language, the majority of communists, post-communists and Greens currently act like ‘disaffected social democrats’, while social democrats act like ‘disaffected neoliberals’. And paradoxically, both draw some of their strength precisely from the fact that they are opposed to policies they in part adopt! Hence these ‘discontents’ are not wholly antagonistic. They even turn out to be complementary, as the experiences of the gauche plurielle in France and the SPD-Green coalition in Germany tend to indicate. Now, the deradicalization of most left-wing forces creates a strategic situation that is propitious to the specifically social-democratic dynamic of de-radicalization. If the left-wing forces are likewise following a centripetal motion, the price of moderation becomes less high (occasionally even nil) for the social-democratic parties, moderate parties par excellence. In consequence, they can desert their traditional ideological and political zone at reduced risk.
The socialist parties and their left (or ‘neither left nor right’) rivals have become forces of pressure vis-à-vis one another and, simultaneously, forces under pressure. Faced with the socialists who are solidly entrenched in the institutions, and know how to recuperate the new and old themes expressed on the margins of the system, these parties do not find life easy. They are certainly ‘different’ enough, and powerful enough, to leave their mark on ideological competition and social-democratic policy. But at the same time, they are rather ‘similar’, powerless to influence this competition decisively, and seriously reorientate social-democratic policy options. Thus, their influence is not negligible, but it is not strong either. Consequently, while the dialectic of competition on the left and centre-left of politics can supply a corrective to social-democratic politics towards the left (as well as in a more ‘new politics’ direction), this ‘corrective’ would not appear to be such as to change the political orientation of contemporary social democracy fundamentally – at least for the time being.
Notes
1.Göran Therborn, ‘Europe in the Twenty-first Century: The World’s Scandinavia?’, in Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson, eds, The Question of Europe, Verso, London and New York, 1997, p. 365.
2.Miriam Golden, Michael Wallerstein and Peter Lange, ‘Postwar Trade-Union Organization and Industrial Relations in Twelve Countries’, in Herbert Kitschelt et al., eds, Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, pp. 223–4.
3.John Scott, Stratification and Power: Structures of Class, Status and Command, Polity Press, Cambridge 1996, p. 241.
4.Michel Vakaloulis, ‘Antagonisme social et action collective’, in Vakaloulis, ed., Travail salarié et conflit social, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1999, p. 245.
5.Colin Crouch, ‘Exit or Voice: Two Paradigms for European Industrial Relations after the Keynesian Welfare State’, European Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 1, no. 1, 1995, p. 77.
6.Jelle Visser, ‘The Strength of Union Movements in Advanced Capitalist Democracies: Social and Organizational Variations’, in Marino Regini, ed., The Future of Labour Movements, Sage, London 1992, pp. 42–3.
7.Philip O’Connell, ‘National Variation in the Fortunes of Labor: A Pooled and Cross-Sectional Analysis of the Impact of Economic Crisis in the Advanced Capitalist Nations’, in Thomas Janoski and Alexander Hicks, eds, The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994, pp. 234–6.
8.Paul Boreham and Richard Hall, ‘Trade Union Strategy in Contemporary Capitalism: The Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Implications of Political Unionism’, Economic and Industrial Democracy, vol. 15, Sage, London 1994, p. 344.
9.See Sophie Béroux, René Mouriaux and Michel Vakaloulis, Le Mouvement social en France. Essai de sociologie politique, La Dispute, Paris 1998. See also the very comprehensive analysis of Michel Vakaloulis, “Mouvement social et analyse politique”, in Claude Leueveu et Michel Vakaloulis, Faite mouvement, PUF, Paris, 1998.
10.Jan Michels, ‘La gauche sans la lutte des classes’, Politique, nos 9–10, 1999, p. 98.
11.Quoted in Eustache Kouvélakis, Philosophie et révolution de Kant à Marx, doctoral thesis, University of Paris VIII, 1998, p. 64; forthcoming, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 2001.
12.Andrew Richards, Down But Not Out: Labour Movements in Late Industrial Societies, Instituto Juan March, Madrid 1995.
13.Ibid.
14.Gérard Grunberg, Vers un socialisme européen?, Hachette, Paris 1997, pp. 38–43.
15.Donald Sasson, One Hundred Years of Socialism, I.B. Tauris, London 1996, p. 197; emphasis added.
16.Geoff Eley, ‘Socialism by Any Other Name? Illusions and Renewal in the History of the Western European Left’, New Left Review, no. 227, 1998, p. 115.
17.Ibid.
18.The same role of ‘corrective’ has often been performed in the past by the communist parties (where they were strong), and the trade unions (where they were closely linked to the social-democratic party), or by both at once. As social democracy’s entire historical trajectory has demonstrated, the influence of parties to the left of social democracy, and the pressure they exert over it, has a far from negligible impact on its identity and its ideological and programmatic development.
19.Hanspeter Kriesi, ‘Movements of the Left, Movements of the Right: Putting the Mobilization of Two New Types of Social Movements into Political Context’, in Kitschelt et al., eds, Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 421.
20.The case of the German Greens, a formation in the vanguard of the ecological movement, is exemplary. In government the Greens abandoned their traditional pacifism and anti-NATO stance (supporting the NATO intervention in Kosovo), as well as their commitments on the cancellation of nuclear energy. In addition, they have made a major compromise on the question of the ‘dual nationality’ of immigrants living in Germany.
21.Quoted in Mario Telo, Le New Deal européen: la pensée et la politique socialesdémocrates face à la crise des années trente, Université de Bruxelles, Brussels 1988, p. 109.
22.Robert Hue, quoted in Le Monde, 14 September 1999.
23.Donald Sassoon, ‘Socialisme fin-de-siècle. Quelques reflexions historiques’, Actuel Marx, no. 23, 1998, p. 144.
24.Ibid., pp. 144–6.
25.Liberation, 10 July 1998.
26.As for the Green parties, the reorientation of the social democrats in a more ‘new politics’ direction has prevented the specifically ‘new politics’ parties from differentiating themselves sufficiently and occupying their initial privileged, and electorally profitable, niche unhindered. At the same time, and symmetrically, these parties, electoral spokespersons of ‘post-materialist’ strata, have been pushed by the persistent centrality of the social question, and by social-democratic repositioning towards a more pro-capitalist posture, to adopt a programmatic profile that is rather more ‘traditionally left-wing’. They have thus been prompted to accord greater importance to the social question and socioeconomic themes, in order to compete with the social democrats on their own terrain and to take advantage of the social shortcomings of economic administration by socialist governments. Indeed, the weakness of social democracy on its own privileged terrain – equality and the welfare state – has created a veritable political and programmatic vacuum, which the left-wing oppositions (in the first place, post-communist or communist in origin, but also in part those that are more classically ‘new politics’) have sought to fill.
27.German social democrat Erhard Eppler à propos of the German Greens, Erhard Eppler, ‘Some programmatic remarks about the German SDP’, in Cuperus and Kandel, eds, European Social Democracy: Transformation in Progress, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Amsterdam 1998, p. 244.
28.Libération, 10 July 1998.