The Last Deep Root
Social democracy has not been able to curb the development of capitalism; like a social chameleon it has, in a sense, embraced its logic and its contradictions. However, it has established various state, social and institutional safeguards, and modified the capitalist dynamic by inflecting it towards the framing of a different civilization. Today, social democrats more or less (and the ‘more’ or ‘less’ counts) adopt the logic – and ethics – of the market. They have made their latest great historical compromise with the ‘structural power’ of capital. This compromise – which, like the postwar compromise, assumes in part the form of ‘modernization’ – is the most painful and agonizing of all.
A democratic compromise – or ‘social-liberal’ compromise, in Mario Telo’s terms – underlay the wave of democratization that swept Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and immediately after the First World War. Sometimes through alliances with liberal currents in particular, the ‘democracy-first strategy’1 had as its objective ‘to win political liberties and recognition of basic rights for workers’. For tactical reasons, this led socialists to accept a residual social policy, without much active engagement by the state.2 The politics of democratization assumed very different forms and was integrated into distinct – even conflicting – strategic designs.3 In addition, implementation of the ‘strategy of political equality’ often occurred in a diffuse climate of elite hostility and reaction against the ‘tyranny of the masses’ and democratic forms of government. However, this ‘democratic’ strategy changed the nature of parliamentary government; whatever the desire of the other parties, it transformed the content of public debate, ‘projecting class difference and conflict – something denied by liberal parliamentarism – directly on to the political stage’.4 Moreover, and above all, it did not prevent social-democratic forces of the time remaining true to their ideological arsenal, which was more or less anti-capitalist and frequently of Marxist inspiration or coloration.
The central aspect of social-democratic programmatic reorientation in the 1930s consisted in expansion of the state’s economic engagement (deficit spending, employment, welfare, etc.), and rejection of the automatic functioning of the market. ‘The specificity of the social-democratic compromises that were sought or implemented from the crisis of 1929 onwards consists … in the search for a post-liberal solution,’ Mario Telo has written.5 The intellectual framework and ideological prop of this post-liberal solution was ‘anti-capitalist reformism’. In theory, interwar social-democratic reformism (not identified with ‘revisionism’) was conceived as a gradual, step-by-step strategy which, with the state playing a key role, would cumulatively lead to a profound transformation of the capitalist system.
Following the Second World War (and particularly from the second half of the 1950s), social democrats one after another progressively and definitively abandoned their anti-capitalist credo. The state was regarded less and less as an instrument of transition to socialism (and increasingly as an instrument for the regulation of capitalism and ‘social protectionism’); private initiative was promoted more and more, particularly in the framework of the mixed economy. The reconciliation with the ‘social market economy’ undertaken by the SPD’s Bad Godesberg conference (1959) was the most important step symbolically in a strategy that began to spread, in various forms, to the majority of European countries.6 However, the promotion – and institution (once in government) – of a fairly powerful public apparatus of regulation (administration), production (public sector and services), and protection-redistribution (welfare state) formed part of the ‘social-democratic idea’.7 The bi- and tripartite postwar compromise, which was at the base of the construction of the modern social state, the mixed economy, and greater attention to the interests of the subaltern classes, was post-liberal – and partly anti-liberal – in character, contesting the omnipotence of the markets.
Notwithstanding significant ideological revisions and renunciations, and despite social democracy’s paralysis in the 1920s (when it had difficulty asserting its specificity, and remained the prisoner of the liberal orthodoxy of the epoch), none of these previous ‘turns’ called into question the role of state intervention – or even some state planning – ideologically (before the Great War), or practically (the 1930s and immediate postwar years). The question of the state has always been at the heart of social democracy’s identity. Social democracy was also able to promote the political and trade-union rights, the economic and symbolic interests, of the working-class and popular strata, and often to advance them in practice. As Gerard Grunberg has indicated:
the evolution of the relationship between socialism and economic liberalism that took place from the thirties to the seventies was possible because the socialist parties were able to interpret this relationship in the light of their own values, goals and identity. They did not only conform to economic liberalism, but also transformed it. This transformation involved five main areas: the process of class compromise, the welfare state, Keynesian policies, nationalisation and economic planning.8
Now, with the exception of the welfare state – where, despite cuts, ‘paradoxically, most social democratic pledges in favour of market solutions are not signs of irreversible neo-liberalism, but merely attempts to assure the economic viability of welfare statism’9 – social-democratic policy has been jettisoned in all these ‘areas’. Not only has the role of the state in steering the economy been minimized, but this has been accompanied by a conscious strategy of deregulatory interventionism aimed at promoting the market. Planning, already scarcely practised in the majority of cases, has been totally abandoned. The policy of public property in some major enterprises has been replaced by a policy of outright or partial privatization. The strategy of moderate redistribution of wealth towards popular strata in the context of a major social compromise has been renounced in practice. Social democracy has ceased to be an effective force for even the moderate promotion of equality and working-class influence, particularly trade-union influence.
In any revision and compromise, the implicit but crucial question is this: is there a ‘possible coherence’ between the new ideological/programmatic profile and the historically defined identity of the actor engaged in the revision? Basically, the issue is ‘safeguarding’ identity in the new historical phase.10 In previous compromises, such preservation – or rather, a certain preservation – was possible, despite some important costs in terms of social-democratic identity. While social democracy emerged transformed, and sometimes sorely tested, following each turn and revision, it was not denatured and altered in its essentials.
Thus, throughout all previous formulations and versions of historical social democracy – which, at national level, splinter into an indefinite series of particular cases – an immutable, central, common core went unquestioned: the attribution of an important role to the state, and the preservation and affirmation of the privileged representative link between social democracy and working-class/popular strata. The state and the promotion – a certain promotion – of the interests of disadvantaged groups are the two points of contact – and continuity – between the different stages of social-democratic history.
Indeed, the active role assigned to the state by social democrats (in the form either of the radical-revolutionary state, or of the reformist-redistributive state, or a combination of the two) is a near-constant element in the long social-democratic tradition. Similarly, the attribution of centrality, real and/or symbolic (and varying with the times), to the promotion of working-class interests is also a quasi-constant in this tradition. It assumed highly diverse forms depending on the epoch, and varied from country to country in the same epoch. Let me give a few examples. It took the form of promoting the democratic rights of worker-citizens, which fell well short of the objective of redistribution (social democracy at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century). Or it took the form of promoting a sort of radical equality, which went well beyond the ‘modest’ objective of redistribution, and had as its precondition the overthrow of capitalism (historical social-democratic parties belonging to an anti-capitalist, revolutionary tradition). Or it could involve advancing ‘immediate’ working-class interests, which was bound up with the necessity of improving the hard daily lot of the ‘have-nots’ (this involved both explicitly and openly anti-capitalist parties, and the more moderate parties); or promoting redistribution stricto sensu (this extended to all parties after the Second World War and, to a certain extent, in the interwar period). In short, this dual ‘core’ forms part of the political heritage (in Seraphim Seferiades’ terms) of both the ‘revolutionary-rational’ model of continental social democracy up to World War I (especially before 1910), and the ‘reformistrational’ model of subsequent phases.11 The presence of this ‘dual core’ was also confirmed in England: Labourism’s ‘pure path to reformism’,12 which the left-wing turbulence of 1918–26 destabilized only temporarily, is no exception. In consequence, this core was constitutive of the social-democratic revolutionary project, which in practice frequently amounted to simply a ‘transforming’ reformism.13 In other countries (or the same countries somewhat later), it was also constitutive of ‘classical’ reformism, which (as in Belgium up to the beginning of the 1930s) operated from without, being as a general rule an oppositional reformism – or only exceptionally a governmental reformism.14 It was equally constitutive of the ‘administrative’ reformism (réformisme gestionnaire) which, particularly from the 1930s to the end of the 1970s, characterized the governmental practice of social democrats in different ways at different times.15
Thus, over the very long historical term these two elements have constituted the hard core, the enduring and crucial node which, regardless of the historically highly variable content and forms of the link, connected the anti-capitalist social democracy of the original Second International to the ‘force for social capitalism’ represented by postwar Keynesian social democracy. They are the ‘core tenets’ of a long tradition marked by more breaks than continuities.16
Today, this historical dual core has been largely removed by the neoliberal upsurge in social-democratic ranks. Bergounioux and Grunberg, two perceptive analysts of the social-democratic phenomenon, are certainly correct when they claim that ‘European socialism has gone through successive definitions … [and] this invalidates critiques of a teleological kind, which diagnose the end of socialism at each historical stage that differs from the previous one’.17 Moreover, Bergounioux is likewise right when he asserts that ‘socialism was historically constructed at the intersection of two dynamics, that of the market and that of democracy’; and that ‘we are still witnessing the clash of these two logics’.18 But to maintain – as he proceeds to – that ‘the fundamental matrix constitutive of European socialism persists’, because ‘the social-democratic parties still find themselves on the same side – the side of those who believe it is possible to exercise collective control and to oppose another legitimacy to that of the market’,19 is a claim that must be qualified. For a start, the range of ‘those who believe that it is possible to oppose another legitimacy to that of the market’ is immense. A large number of liberals, Christian democrats, and even conservatives have adopted a clear position against ‘unbridled’ liberalism, without thereby becoming ‘social democrats’. Next, the pursuit of policies of deregulation and competitive rigour by social democracy has, for the first time in its history, directly challenged what was most dear, hallowed and enduring in its ideological and political tradition: the socially and economically active role of the state, and the interests of the most disadvantaged groups in the population.
In effect, in its conscious and explicit adhesion to a moderately but clearly neoliberal mode of regulation, social democracy has made the decisive ideological leap: for the first time so openly and systematically, it has elevated the market and devalued the utility of the economically active state.20 Thus, it has not endorsed – or rather, has only marginally endorsed – the ‘clash of two logics’ to which Bergounioux refers. In reality, 1980s social democracy was (in Claude Demelenne’s strong words):
complicit with one of the most gigantic coups d’état of the postwar period: that which hoisted the financial markets into power. The left has been on the wrong side in all the battles: total liberalization of capital movements, signature of the GATT accords, creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), installation of an unbridled free-trade regime, construction of a market and fortress Europe … deregulation, privatization and the undoing of public power.21
Furthermore, in the race for competitive disinflation and rigour, the governmental left has, despite its social discourse, departed in practice from defence of the interests of wage-earners, and particularly the ‘poorest of the poor’. Social democracy has thus been transformed from a political force for the moderate promotion of equality within a socioeconomic system that is by definition inegalitarian, into a force for the moderate promotion of inequality in the face of forces that are even more inegalitarian.
In other words, it has been transformed from a force that has long since renounced its anti-capitalist vocation into a force that today is even abandoning its moderately anti-plutocratic vocation (as Vilfredo Pareto termed it). So it is scarcely surprising if social democracy ‘does not succeed so readily in inflecting economic demands to the left ideologically’.22 Nor is it surprising if left-wing leaders act ‘in ways that reinforce their structural dependence on capital … and render labor increasingly peripheral as a political actor’.23
Now, what is involved here is an extra-ordinary development (in the etymological sense of the term) – and an extraordinary default – which probably extends to the ‘last’ deep root, the last distinctive foundation of the social-democratic edifice, such as we have known it for three half-centuries.
Over the long term, social-democratic history is doubtless the history of its modernizations and ‘adaptations’. But the latest ‘adaptation’ constitutes a ‘break’ (and it is irrelevant whether all the previous ‘adaptations’ have equally been perceived and experienced as ‘breaks’). In effect, by calling into question the essentials of its basic culture and former governmental practice, social democracy is verging on a rupture in its identity. The distance between its past and its present, what it claims to be and what it does, ‘what it wants to be and what it has been’, is such as definitively to problematize the ‘possible coherence’ to which Telo refers. If it has not already expired, a ‘pact’ that has lasted more than a century seems, since the second half of the 1970s, to be on the point of being broken. Hence the crisis in the partisan imaginary of social democracy, which persists even in parties that are currently victorious; hence the deficit of self-conception, which reflects, expresses and reveals profound doubts about the ethical objective of contemporary socialist action. Basically, as Marc Lazar has clearly shown, the content of social-democratic ‘reformism’ is more than ever under the spotlight: ‘it is conspicuous by its imprecision and is scarcely distinct from the reformism to which other political currents (centrists, social-liberals, Christian democrats, even some ecologists) adhere’.24 The reforms promulgated and implemented by today’s social democrats are not integrated into a coherent, specifically social-democratic project. To adopt Ilvo Diamanti’s formula, what we are dealing with is ‘reforms without reformism’.25 In reality, the new social-democratic ‘reformism’ is a reformism of resignation. To start with, social redistribution, traditionally the first plank in social-democratic reformist action, is practically abandoned. In the second place, ‘structural reforms’, the other traditional plank in social-democratic reformist action,26 are either utterly anaemic and sparse, or are not integrated into any overall left-wing strategy (despite the implementation of left reforms). Moreover, some of these reforms – ‘structural reforms’ still exist! – derive from the conservative arsenal. Many of the most important reforms implemented by contemporary social democracy (NB: not all) are clearly integrated – and not always with a ‘guilty conscience’ – into the enemy’s reformist project (privatization, market liberalization, independence of central banks, etc.). A reformist ‘spiral’ is definitely at work. Just as in the past, socialist reformism entailed the formation of non- and anti-socialist reform movements,27 so today right-reformism drags socialists along in its wake. ‘Democracy in Europe was often expanded and consolidated by its enemies,’ Stathis Kalyvas has written.28 In some countries the social state has likewise been ‘expanded and consolidated by its enemies’. Today, the same applies to neoliberal reform.
Certainly, from a macro-historical point of view, the neoliberal compromise is ultimately a change of limited impact compared with the postwar compromise (of which a less developed, but more composite and often more radical, version emerged on a large scale in the 1930s). The great break in historical continuity is located elsewhere: in social democracy’s renunciation of its anti-capitalist vocation and assertion of its ‘reformist’ identity. Visible in the attitude of some currents and leaders in the working-class movement from the 1880s and 1890s, reformism began to dominate social-democratic practice somewhat shamefacedly in the first decade of the twentieth century,29 was clearly asserted in 1914, and consolidated as a central attribute of social-democratic identity in the 1920s and 1930s. But the peculiarity of the neoliberal compromise is that it is a borderline-compromise, which consists in barring – certainly in practice, partially in ideology – the paths not of any continuity whatsoever with the past, but of the most basic continuity conceivable. Thus, the latest revisionist undertaking, and the latest wave of policies implemented in the name of social democracy, go considerably beyond anything called ‘social democracy’ up to the 1970s. In effect, social democrats have ended up accepting – certainly in practice, partially in rhetoric – that state intervention, as well as some aspects of the welfare state, threaten not liberty and democracy, as the most extreme supporters of liberalism assert, but economic growth and competitiveness. While it is not total, the switch is fundamental. In an ironic sense, compared with the most classical and celebrated revisionism – that of Bernstein, promoting the gradual socialization of the means of production – the new revisionism (based on the market and the gradual privatization of state property) makes it possible to appreciate the spectacular gulf between the current enterprise and past revisionism.30 The evolution of social democracy thus fully confirms Albert Hirschman’s analysis. Curiously, according to Hirschman, it was the third great ‘reactionary’ wave, criticizing the welfare state and welfare capitalism (whereas the first was ferociously opposed to the French Revolution and the second to universal suffrage and political equality), the one ‘least consciously intent on reversing the ongoing trends or reforms’, which had ‘the most destructive impact’.31
‘Destructive impact’ is the right way of putting it. Social democracy embodied ‘a social experiment of enormous proportions’: the politics of solidarity.32 But its ongoing modernization is such as to demolish the foundations of social-democratic ‘modernization’ in the initial postwar period – especially if the new social democrats continue further along the path that has been marked out, which is not a foregone conclusion. Social democracy is on the verge of a change in its identity because it is no longer capable of embodying that ‘social experiment of enormous proportions’; and because it is not capable of definitively turning its back on the logic – and politics – of solidarity either. It thus finds itself in a strategic ‘inbetween’ because its identity is intermediate. Perry Anderson gives us a superbly accurate portrait of contemporary social democracy’s borderline-state:
once, in the founding years of the Second International, it was dedicated to the general overthrow of capitalism. Then it pursued partial reforms as gradual steps towards socialism. Finally it settled for welfare and full employment within capitalism. If it now accepts a scaling down of the one and the giving up of the other, what kind of a movement will it change into?33
The Popular Space: A Historical Crisis of Representation
The unprecedented character of the new social-democratic modernization is confirmed, reinforced, and finds its ‘sociological’ base in the loosening of the ties that used to bind the social-democratic elites to the social-democratic ‘people’.
The Subaltern Classes on the Margins of the Social-Democratic System
Two new intermediaries have gradually entered and interposed themselves between social democracy and popular strata, between the political ‘representatives’ and the politically ‘represented’, blurring the historical relation of representation: an ideological/theoretical element – the economic philosophy of neoliberalism – and a sociological element – the dominant and domineering middle-class presence in social-democratic organizations. Without being directly linked (each in part acts independently of the other), the effects of these two new intermediaries reinforce and complement one another. With neoliberalism, which ceases to be an isolated enclave on enemy ideological territory, social democracy’s ideological/programmatic horizon alters, without undergoing wholesale neoliberalization. With this change, disadvantaged strata – those who work in uncompetitive or low-wage services industries, who find themselves unemployed or socially marginalized – cease to be at the heart of the practical ideology and activity of socialist governments. In addition, with new middle strata increasingly controlling the vital organizational and cultural levers of the social-democratic system, workers and the disadvantaged cease to be at its ‘institutional’ centre. They are displaced to the margins. Thus, through these two new intermediaries, which have rapidly become extremely conspicuous and influential, the system of ‘social democracy’ ceases predominantly to echo the material and symbolic preoccupations of the subaltern classes.
Social-democratic rhetoric traditionally concerned the ‘weight of the world’, and still does. The social democrats’ desire to promote the interests of low-income wage-earners, as well as those members of the population who are ‘drawn from the dregs of society, the out-of-work, the social wrecks’ – as Moisei Ostrogorski would say – is clearly indicated. But the ‘attenuation’, even loss, of the sociological specificity of social-democratic organizations (which in some cases has completely disappeared) could complicate programmatic renewal by a ‘return to the social’. A sociological absence is not easily remedied, or remedied by proxy. And even where this ‘return to the social’ might occur, the new sociology of the organizations would probably defy and thwart its implementation. Political experience attests to the frequent disparity between ‘saying’ and ‘doing’, programme and performance. Seconded by the familiar constraints of power, the new sociology of social-democratic organizations possesses (or could acquire) a dynamic that leads to what we might call a programmatic ‘crash’. This involves imposing, in a period of financial crisis of the state and globalization, a political and social course other than that set out in the programmatic texts. But the course defined by the act of governing is, and always has been, the only one that counts. Accordingly – as Gerrit Voerman has written – if the ‘express desire’ to promote the interests of the poorest ‘is not backed by the adhesion of some of those concerned, the legitimacy [of the social-democratic parties] risks being rocked’.34 This has not yet come to pass. But control of the organizations by the ‘contented majority’ could prove a sizeable obstacle to any attempt at renewal or modernization by a radical ‘return to the social’. A sociological absence – let me repeat this – is not remedied easily, or remedied by proxy.
Social democrats have definitely not abandoned the platform of equality and social justice. These ideals still form part of their armoury. However, given the neoliberalization of their economic philosophy, the infiltration of their organizations by the middle classes, and the electoral priority accorded to the latter,35 this rhetoric functions as what a diver would call a ‘decompression stage’: a border-zone, a zone of contact that is indispensable to the transition from one state to another, from one social democracy to another, without abolishing loyalties and filiations, and without ‘smashing’ the machine. In this context the ‘social’ discourse, the discourse on ‘social justice’, becomes incoherent, and tails off. It is without momentum or bite. It is an inoffensive discourse.
The Social-Democratic Subsystem and the Elite/Popular Divide
The crisis of the major ideologies contributes substantially to reinforcing the ‘marginalization’, both real and symbolic, of popular strata. In the past the existence of great collective belief systems had the effect of providing individuals with a framework, making them feel secure, and establishing ‘systematic links between the top and bottom of society’.36 As Emmanuel Todd has stressed, each of the great ideologies united individuals from different social and professional milieux in one and the same belief. Thus, each ideological subsystem ‘had its people and its elite, who felt solidarity with one another’.37 Now, the crisis of the major ideological systems has important sociological consequences. In France, for example, according to Todd, the demise of Catholicism also meant the end of the links between Catholic bourgeois and peasants. The death of communism also betokened ‘the end of the solidarity between workers and teachers, and the advent of innumerable individuals restored to their minuscule human scale’. The shattering of the great ideologies that divided society into hostile ‘vertical blocs’ – rivalling one another, but internally relatively ‘solidaristic’ – has helped to widen the distance between the ‘people’ and the ‘elites’.
Moreover, the association between the middle classes and ‘modernity’, which (I must repeat) finds exemplary political expression in the ideological formulations of the ‘new’ social democracy, contributes to a divide between the categories of people who participate in the new ‘modernity’ and those who have missed the boat. The contrast with the past is all the greater when we think of the representation of the working class as the class ‘of the future’, which was once widespread but is now increasingly outmoded. The supremacy of the salaried middle strata (particularly their higher echelons) within the organizational space of social democracy, which gradually emerged over recent decades and is now irrevocably established, helps cumulatively to reinforce the sense of a gulf between ‘elites’ and ‘masses’.
On the basis of this perception and dividing line, the higher sociocultural categories of the population, with their significant economic, cultural or educational capital (inherited or acquired), appear to form a ‘world apart’. Politicians, ‘sophisticated’ union leaders, ‘spin doctors’, highly rated journalists, politically influential businessmen, university professors, communications and political marketing professionals, senior executives in the public and private sectors, executives in EU institutions, ‘politicized’ artists – these constitute a relatively homogeneous milieu, notwithstanding different partisan loyalties. Because of the crisis or dilution of strong ideological subsystems, this politically fragmented milieu has largely lost the sense of ‘solidarity’ with the base of society. In the absence of strong, opposed ideologies, intellectual, sociological and mental affinities prevail over division and adversity within it. The segments composing it are in some sense ‘de-social-democratized’, ‘de-Christianized’, or ‘de-communized’. With this development, contemporary politics risks unwittingly leaving a large proportion of society outside the political picture, becoming, as it were – if only partially – a quasi-private space specializing in public affairs. A new sociological and symbolic border, internal to the social-democratic subsystem, is thus established. Within le tout Paris – to recall and use Anne Martin-Fugier’s expression – or the smart sets of London, Athens or Brussels – semi-enclosed, luxury milieux – there is a social-democratic component.
This component is no longer equipped to represent – or even imagine – the ‘grandeur and misery’ of the most modest milieux. It is cloistered in its certitudes and its mental fortresses. Its social discourse is increasingly reduced to the bien-pensant ethics of smart districts, moralistic and focused on interclassist values (‘human dignity’, ‘rights’, anti-racism, etc.). This is the ‘consensus of fine sentiments’, developed on the ruins of traditional economic and social politics.38 It is not surprising that the losers from globalization – the ‘dark continent’ of social exclusion – often feel betrayed by this left, which was once ‘their’ left. Their expectations and problems are ‘politically inexpressible’.39 In effect, part of the contemporary social-democratic elites is in the process of distancing itself from ‘its’ people. The Roman emperors, wrote Étienne de La Boétie, were fond of taking the title ‘Tribune of the People’, an office considered holy and sacred, in order to assure themselves of the people’s confidence, and erase all memory of the adverse effects of their actual policies.40 Intent – via the politics of the ‘new centre’ or ‘radical centre’ – on rallying the most ‘in’ sections of the population – those who combine economic dynamism with the weapons of culture and upward social mobility41 – the elites of the new social democracy dispense even with that ambition.
In addition, in some countries the consolidation of the popular bases of the new extreme right, its breakthrough in urban working-class districts hit by the crisis, further weakens the bond of representation between the left (socialist or communist) and working-class/popular strata. Especially as a result of its ‘failure’ in social policy, the left no longer succeeds in drawing the mass of workers and subaltern classes in its cultural wake (see Part II). The populist extreme right tends in part to take over the tribunitial function of articulating the demands of a plebs that feels increasingly excluded from the ‘system’. Indeed, populism has no fear of the people, that ‘great body of unknowns’:42 ‘the ideas I defend? Yours’, claims Jean-Marie Le Pen, in classic fashion.43 Thus, a new cleavage is superimposed on the left/right divide, opposing the ‘elites’ to the ‘people’, separating those ‘above’ from those ‘below’. And this division weakens the popular entrenchment of the social-democratic parties.
This being so, today, perhaps for the first time since the beginning of the twentieth century, popular strata are deprived of a political representation that is at once uncontested and more or less effective. Indeed, ‘parties of the poor’ no longer exist (despite the fact that the world of the poor – and, consequently, that of the rich – has grown). A fortiori, ‘parties of the excluded’ no longer exist (despite the fact that the ‘world of the excluded’ – and, consequently, that of the ‘excluders’ – has likewise expanded). In other words, there are no longer parties equivalent to those of the ‘Red belts’, to speak of a period that is not so remote after all.44 Constructed as representative bodies par excellence of disadvantaged social milieux – or, in the specialist language of political science, as ‘parties of social integration’ – such parties have disappeared from the modern political landscape. That, indeed, is the story of the modern left. While it is not identical to neoliberal or populist conservatism, its political platform no longer corresponds to popular ‘demand’. Tested by twenty-five years of austerity policies and catch-all appeals, the social and psychological contract that bound popular strata to social democracy and the left has become looser organizationally as well as electorally. Worse still: the famous fracture sociale is in part installed within socialist and social-democratic organizational space (see Part II).
Working-class/popular distance from social democracy – which is a sign of deterioration, not rupture, in the link of representation – indicates the incapacity of a structure to perform not any old function, but a central function that formed part of its raison d’être and innermost history: defence of the interests of the subaltern classes, historical – and contemporary – source of any left-wing initiative with a majority vocation. In a sense, this defence became coterminous with social democracy, a factor of both political identity and electoral vitality. From this perspective, the crisis in the relationship between social democracy and the subaltern classes is the weightiest consequence historically of the new social-democratic compromise. Especially were it to persist, this constitutes the defining, crucial weakness – the Achilles heel – of social democracy’s latest, ongoing transformation and modernization; and distinguishes it from all previous modernizations. It is the critical crisis. Because of it, contemporary social-democratic culture is characterized by a ‘major blurring of ideology and identity’, in Marc Lazar’s words. And because of it, the social-democratic parties, ‘regarded not as plain agents of political competition, but as producers of meaning’, are in crisis.45
Social-Democratic Parties without Social Democracy?
Let me take up, and reformulate, the question posed by Perry Anderson. What is left of social democracy after these successive waves of de-radicalization, especially the latest of them? Does a specifically social-democratic political logic persist, as Alain Bergounioux maintains?
Even if this might appear paradoxical, the structure remains, but without the function. Although it is significantly modified and weakened, the social-democratic organizational-institutional apparatus is still there, and ensures a certain basic continuity. The social-democratic structure described throughout this study has not exploded, even if its centre has largely fissured and its contours have altered. Social democracy has not evaporated; nor has it gone over to the ‘enemy camp’. And it cannot. It cannot become another political force (liberal, Christian democrat, etc.), even if it is significantly different by comparison with itself. There also remains a social-democratic inclination (in Bergounioux’s terminology, a ‘social-democratic political logic’), which is suspicious of ‘any market’, and takes the route of legislation and social negotiation.46
In reality, while the change in social democracy is significant, it has not created a new structure of political-social polarities, as happened during the transition from the ‘Whig Left’ to the working-class/socialist left.47 We are not witnessing the demise of the left/right divide, the world turned upside down. The contradictory identity of contemporary social democrats, who face the dual impossibility of both breaking with and adopting the logic of solidarity (by implementing policies in the interests of disadvantaged social strata), is at root an ‘impossible’ identity. Precisely because it is such, for all its aggressive overtones and novel revisionist concepts, this ‘impossible’ identity does not – and will not be able to – obliterate the divide of the Industrial Revolution, or the compromise bound up with that divide.48 Moreover, ‘the institutions of industrial class society are still in place in Europe, and they are not likely to evaporate in the foreseeable future’, even if ‘they are less significant as rallying-points of collective identity and behaviour’.49 So contemporary socialists are thus not proposing a ‘refoundation’ of the democratic game and the capital-labour compromise, or a new ‘narrative of origins’, to borrow François Furet’s term. Instead, in and through their actual policies, they ‘propose’ a significant rearrangement of the terms of that compromise, to the advantage of capital and middle strata. Social democracy has changed – it has even changed profoundly. But the change is not comparable to that of the nineteenth century: it does not mark – to quote Michele Salvati – ‘a profound, epochmaking shift, similar to the divide between the liberal democratic left of the post-French Revolution period and the distinctly socialist left that came after’.50
So what is left of social democracy at the beginning of the new century? A social-democratic structure and sensibility remain operative (to talk, as Bergounioux does, about a social-democratic ‘logic’ seems to me excessive). But this ‘structure’ (which has itself changed considerably), and this ‘sensibility’, are not such as to fix a distinctively social-democratic stamp, a left-wing hallmark, on the social and political system, except in a very feeble way. In other words, there is a social-democratic pole in the European party systems, which is often strong; and a social-democratic political sensibility not identified with ‘unbridled’ liberalism, which is hesitantly seeking the path to a more socially orientated national and European politics. However, what does not exist – at least not now, or not yet – is a clearly defined social-democratic social and economic ‘role’, which is perceived as such. Nor is there a logic that is liable to shatter the legitimacy of market logic, ready and able to ground a different legitimacy, which is clearly antagonistic to neoliberal orthodoxy. What the ‘social-liberalism’ of contemporary social democracy is, and what it proposes, is an attenuated version of liberalism, supplemented with important ‘new politics’ ingredients (and certainly retaining some ‘old’ social-democratic ingredients, especially in the domain of social policy), rather than an attenuated version of classical social democracy. In short, a left-wing alternation exists – and any alternation is such only because it preserves a certain specific identity that is more than merely rhetorical. So there is an alternation, the functional prerequisite of competitive democracy and the conflict between majority and opposition. But what does not exist is a left-wing alternative, even a moderate left-wing alternative. Now, in the past, a sort of ‘social democracy without a social-democratic party’ emerged. Today, it is perhaps neither exaggerated nor out of order to pose the question, which runs implicitly throughout this work, of whether a sort of ‘non-social-democracy with a social-democratic party’ – or, more simply, social-democratic parties without social democracy – are in the process of emerging.
Notes
1.Sheri Berman, The Social Democratic Moment: Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London 1998, p. 207.
2.Mario Telo, Le New Deal européen: la pensée et la politique sociales-démocrates face à la crise des années trente, Université de Bruxelles, Brussels 1988, pp. 41, 51.
3.For the ‘conflicting’ cases of the SAP and SPD, see Berman, The Social Democratic Moment, passim.
4.Alain Bergounioux and Gerard Grunberg, L’utopie à l’épreuve. Le socialisme européen au XXe siècle, Éditions de Fallois, Paris 1996, pp. 34–5.
5.Telo, Le New Deal européen, p. 41.
6.The British Labour Party, with its celebrated Clause 4, did not follow this trend to programmatic revision (remaining attached to a more ‘statist’ approach), like the French and Italian socialists. In practice, however, the governmental dispensation of the three parties diverged considerably from their ideological and programmatic options.
7.Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Pierre Rosanvallon, Le nouvel âge des inégalités, Seuil, Paris 1996, p. 164.
8.Gérard Grunberg ‘Socialism and Liberalism’, in René Cuperus and Johannes Kandel, eds, European Social Democracy: Transformation in Progress, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Amsterdam 1998, p. 61.
9.P. Pennings, quoted in Cuperus and Kandel, European Social Democracy, pp. 14–15.
10.See Telo, Le New Deal européen, p. 42.
11.Seraphim Seferiades, Working-Class Movements (1780s-1930s). A European Macro-Historical Analytical Framework and a Greek Case Study, PhD dissertation, Columbia University 1998, pp. 71–3.
12.Ibid., p. 99.
13.Pascal Delwit and Jean Puissant, ‘Les origines et les limites. Les débuts du réformisme socialisme en Belgique’, in Hugues de la Paige and Pascal Delwit, eds, Les Socialistes et le pouvoir, Labor Brussels 1998, p. 255.
14.Guy Vanthemsche, ‘Les mots et les actes: 100 ans de pratique réformiste en Belgique’, in Hugue de Le Paige and Pascal Delwit, eds, Les Socialistes et le pouvoir, Labor, Brussels 1998, pp. 62–74.
15.Ibid., p. 81.
16.It will be obvious that my analysis differs from that of Colin Hay, for whom the ‘transhistorical’ elements that make up the ‘ethical tradition (or imperative)’ and the ‘political practice’ of social democracy are as follows:
| (i) | a commitment to redistribution – to the principle that the distribution of social advantage within any capitalist society at any time can never be equitable and must be addressed through a constant imperative to redistribute; |
| (ii) | a commitment to democratic economic governance – to the principle that the market, left to its own devices, can only generate outcomes which are inefficient, inequitable and unacceptable and that, accordingly, the state must take responsibility for market outcomes and for the degree of intervention required to ameliorate their excesses; |
| (iii) | a commitment to social protectionism – to the principle that it is the primary responsibility of the state to ensure that its citizens are provided for in terms of health, education and welfare in its broadest sense and across the life span. (The Political Economy of New Labour: Labouring under False Pretences?, Manchester University Press, Manchester 1999, pp. 56–7) |
This analysis is penetrating, but inaccurate. It is penetrating because it not does not commit the double error of defining social democracy either by reformism and ‘gradualism’, or by ‘what social-democratic parties do’ (‘According to such a view, social democracy will persist almost indefinitely – indeed, by definition – regardless of the context in which it is expressed’: ibid., p. 56). Nevertheless, the drawback of this approach, focused on the three commitments in question, is that it is not genuinely historical. In reality, it describes only the ‘core set of ethical tenets’ (p. 56) of postwar social democracy, in part of interwar social democracy. Thus it defines social democracy in the habitual sense of the term (see Chapter 1), without really taking account of the orientations of historical social democracy at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth – i.e. revolutionary social democracy (as least as regards some parties in the European socialist/social-democratic family). This social democracy – the social democracy of the first period – integrated the state and working-class interests in a quite different perspective from ‘redistribution’, ‘democratic economic governance’ and ‘social protectionism’. Specific to social democracy in subsequent phases, the three commitments defined by Hay are insufficiently inclusive to account for the whole of a historical evolution that is distinguished by its extraordinary richness and complexity. That said, the social-democratic tradition, like any tradition, must be considered as ‘a space, a constellation of points in movement’, not as a fixed, immobile reference point. From this angle, Hay’s approach is heuristically very useful, because it facilitates evaluation of contemporary social democracy in the light of its recent tradition, particularly that of the postwar period. It also enables us not to fall into the trap of regarding every adaptation or renovation as ‘a departure from and betrayal of that tradition’ (p. 56).
17.Bergounioux and Grunberg, L’utopie à l’épreuve, p. 363.
18.Alain Bergounioux, in Bergounioux and Marc Lazar, La Social-démocratie dans l’Union européenne, Les Notes de la Fondation Jean-Jaurès, Paris 1996, p. 21.
19.Ibid.
20.It is superfluous to add that, given the individualism it involves, promotion of the market sacrifices the last remaining traces of the ‘collectivist’ spirit of historical social democracy. It is, however, worth adding that the most important function of the neo-communitarianism of New Labour is to reconstruct a sense of the collectivity, the latter being irrevocably undermined by the dominion of commercial logic and the neoliberal turn of contemporary social democracy. From this angle, New Labour is doubly distinguished from continental socialism: it is further down the neoliberal road, and more advanced in its attempt to propose a ‘doctrine’ designed to remedy the inhumanities of individualism. However, this ‘doctrine’ exhibits strong affinities with Thatcherite neoconservatism.
21.Claude Demelenne, ‘Pour une gauche debout’, Politique, nos 9–10, 1996, p. 76.
22.Gérard Grunberg and Étienne Schweisguth, ‘Recompositions idéologiques’, in Daniel Boy and Nonna Mayer, eds, L’électeur a ses raisons, Presses de Sciences Politiques, Paris 1997, p. 148.
23.Rand W. Smith, The Left’s Dirty Job: The Politics of Industrial Restructuring in France and Spain, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 1998, p. 224.
24.Marc Lazar, ‘La social-démocratie à l’épreuve de la réforme’, Esprit, no. 251, 1999, p. 133.
25.Ilvo Diamanti, ‘Des réformes sans réformistes en Italie’, Esprit, no. 251, 1999, p. 101.
26.Structural reforms are measures redefining the framework of economic and social life (strengthening of collective actors like trade unions, nationalization, decentralization, etc.). On the content of ‘classical’ reformism, see Fitoussi and Rosanvallon, Le nouvel âge des inégalités, pp. 188–9.
27.Vanthemsche, ‘Les mots et les actes’, p. 70.
28.Stathis Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, and London 1996, p. 264.
29.Parties constructed according to the ‘revolutionary-rational’ model were ‘revolutionary in rhetoric, but increasingly reformist in conviction and, more importantly, in practice’ (Seferiades, Working-Class Movements, p. 73).
30.Seraphim Seferiades, ‘Social Democratic Strategies in the Twentieth Century’, in Ilias Katsoulis, ed., The ‘New’ Social Democracy at the Turn of the Century, Sideris, Athens 2000 (in Greek).
31.Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA and London 1991, p. 6.
32.See Douglas Hibbs, Solidarity or Egoism?, Aarhus University Press, Aarhus (Denmark) 1993, p. 66.
33.Perry Anderson, Introduction, in Anderson and Patrick Camiller, eds, Mapping the West European Left, Verso, London and New York 1994, pp. 15–16.
34.Gerrit Voerman, ‘Le paradis perdu. Les adherents des partis sociaux-démocrates d’Europe occidentale 1945–1995’, in Marc Lazar, ed., La Gauche en Europe depuis 1945, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1996, p. 578.
35.What Mathias Greffrath has written of the CDU and SPD, the major German parties, is valid for all the social-democratic parties of Europe: ‘no one yet dares – especially not at election time – to defy the majority middle class, which defends its standard of living and prefers to drag behind it a growing number of excluded, rather than agreeing to share work, income and opportunity’ (Le Monde Diplomatique, June 1998, p. 13).
36.Emmanuel Todd, L’illusion économique. Essai sur la stagnation des sociétés développées, Gallimard, Paris 1998, p. 264.
37.Ibid.
38.Fitoussi and Rosanvallon, Le nouvel âge des inégalités, p. 21.
39.Philippe Marlière, ‘Sociology of Poverty or Poverty of Sociology? Pierre Bourdieu’s La Misère du monde’, Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, no. 4, 1996, p. 316.
40.See Étienne de La Boétie, Le Discours de la servitude volontaire, Payot, Paris 1993.
41.Jacques Bauduin et al., ‘Vaste chantier …’, Politique, nos 9–19, 1999, p. 7.
42.Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Nowhere Show’, Marxism Today, November/December 1998, p. 14.
43.Quoted in Pascal Perrineau, Le Symptôme Le Pen, Fayard, Paris 1997, p. 231.
44.Gerassimos Moschonas, ‘Quo vadis social-démocratie?’, in Michel Vakaloulis and Jean-Marie Vincent, eds, Marx après les marxismes II: Marx au futur, L’Harmattan, Paris 1997, p. 310.
45.Marc Lazar, ‘Invariants et mutations du socialisme en Europe’, in Lazar, ed., La Gauche en Europe depuis 1945, p. 42.
46.Bergounioux, in La Social-démocratie dans l’Union européenne, p. 22.
47.See Michele Salvati, ‘A View from Italy’, Dissent, Spring 1999, p. 83. And this despite the fact that the accumulated corroborating evidence – which is, however, difficult to quantify – indicates that a section of the higher middle classes and big capital is increasingly converging on contemporary social democracy. This phenomenon is very apparent in Great Britain and Greece.
48.An expression of this compromise, which has not been altogether demolished, is the still very strong legitimation of the social state, despite a certain weakening of its capacity for action. The latter is the jewel in the crown of the capital-labour compromise, and ‘probably, the most lasting heritage of the organized labour movements of which Europe was the original home’ (Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Death of Neo-Liberalism’, Marxism Today, November/December 1998, p. 7).
49.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. 366.
50.Salvati, ‘A View from Italy’, p. 81.