In the course of this work, I have sought to examine the evolution of the force and form represented by the ‘social-democratic party’ in its main dimensions, before proceeding to an overview of that evolution.
At the obvious risk of tiring the reader, the following points must once again be emphasized.
Social democracy was a specific and original ‘structuration’ of the left. On bases that were not wholly foreign to some major communist parties, or even Christian democratic parties, an institutional-political configuration gradually took shape, whose component parts, rather commonplace when taken separately, formed an original and unprecedented whole as a result of their precise combination and weighting. In particular, social democracy in the initial postwar period was a ‘distinctive set of institutions and policies’, a relatively distinctive ‘system of action’. As a rather well-defined species, social democracy is not reducible to left-wing reformism, or simply identifiable with the ‘progressivist pole’ in political systems. For in a sense, there is a specifically social-democratic reformist savoir-faire, sustained and adopted by political formations issuing from the great working-class and popular tradition of West European capitalism. The case of southern European socialism – or, in a quite different context, the American Democratic Party – demonstrates that the social-democratic ‘mode’ is not some ‘natural state’ of the non-communist left, or of the anti-/non-right-wing space.1
Over the last twenty-five years, all the parameters that defined the social-democratic partisan space, and accounted for its specificity in the initial postwar period, have been in mutation to a greater or lesser extent. This involves all levels of social-democratic life. It simultaneously affects the power structure and class character of the organizations, the membership culture, the leadership, the link with the trade unions, the size and social composition of the electorate, location in the arena of partisan competition, ideas, economic and social policies, political style, image – everything that goes to make up an identity. The transformation is profound, because it is not exclusively ideological-programmatic, even though the latter is the most pronounced, conspicuous and discussed dimension of the transformation. It encompasses every dimension of social democracy in a single dynamic. This mutation is the result of several small or large changes, which are complementary and convergent.
According to Alain Bergounioux and Bernard Manin, the long history of social democracy has frequently demonstrated that ‘social-democratic originality consisted less in a determinate policy [e.g. Keynesianism] than in an organizational and cultural tradition, making several policies possible over the course of time’.2 Today, what is in question is not simply the effectiveness of the structuration of social democracy, but also its originality. If all the parameters that defined the social-democratic partisan space in the postwar period are more or less in the process of changing, it is precisely its ‘organizational and cultural tradition’ that is impaired. The progressive weakening or transformation of historical social democracy’s ‘supporting institutions’ (partisan organizations, party/trade-union link, party/associational network link, bi- and tripartite national bargaining systems), and ‘supporting social base’ (traditional working class) have gradually led not to a decline (a ‘crisis’ or ‘crash’) of the system of ‘social democracy’, but to its redefinition. The distinctive attributes that made social democracy a more or less co-ordinated whole are under challenge everywhere to varying degrees. Social democracy is no longer – or rather, is no longer sufficiently – ‘a distinctive set of institutions’,3 a unique implement capable of generating and maintaining a specifically social-democratic modus operandi.
As a result, the ‘originality’ of social democracy has been put in question. Rather than the establishment of a new mode of constitution, a new ‘originality’, we are witnessing a dilution of any originality whatsoever. Social democracy is less and less presented and experienced as a ‘different’ force, a ‘separate’ structuration. It certainly remains a political family distinct from conservatism; and this it will continue to be. It retains some of its historical character traits, and cannot at present readily elude its genetic code, its institutional memory, its organizational know-how; it will probably not be able to do so in the future either. But it has become – or is increasingly becoming – an ‘ordinary’ political force and form. Hence social democracy as a ‘distinctive set of institutions and policies’ is having a hard time of it. The ‘internal institutional space’ of social democracy – to adopt Seraphim Seferiades’ term4 – has been significantly redefined, or is in the process of redefinition. This only serves to highlight the break with the past. A wind of change is blowing through the social-democratic continent, and shaking what Leon Blum (one of the historic leaders of French socialism) called la vieille maison. The ‘typical’ social-democratic trademark has become blurred. Social democracy is undergoing ‘de-social-democratization’.
In the internal space of contemporary social democracy, the organic links with the working-class movement are looser; the structures (party, union, associative) are unravelling, and guard their autonomy with jealousy and pride; the old coherence (party of the working class, organization with a strong working-class presence, strong link with the trade unions, bi- and tripartite negotiation, semi-working-class/semi-catch-all ideological profile, etc.) is breaking up. All this enhances the importance of the elites and the leader. This evolution – one aspect of which is ‘the development of a new plebiscitarian type of party’5 – is particularly important for an understanding of the mechanism through which the contemporary social-democratic movement establishes and formulates its ideology. The leadership becomes the exclusive proprietor of the vital space that is the internal institutional space, and assumes a well-nigh crucial role ‘in formulating the mainstream movement discourse’.6 The definition of identity has become the quasi-exclusive privilege of the party elites and the leader, and not, as in the past, a ‘system with several components’ of which the leadership was a part, even if it doubtless occupied a central position. Although party organizations operate more democratically than they did in the past, the leadership is becoming autonomous vis-à-vis the whole ‘social-democratic’ system (which, moreover, is less and less of a ‘system’). It thus secures extraordinary power, which is isolated and isolating. And fragile. The leader (and the group surrounding him or her) is the isolated manager of isolated ideologies (in the sense that these ideologies are less the product of ‘collective’ elaboration than in the past).7 In this respect social democracy today is more appropriately defined in ideological/programmatic terms (whose content is largely specified by the leader and his modern custodes novellarum) than in terms of ‘organizational and cultural tradition’.
Obviously, we can define social democracy ‘extensively, not comprehensively’. This is what Steven Lukes has done in another context – and legitimately so. According to Lukes, what ultimately defines the left is the commitment to the principle of rectifying inequalities, or the ‘project of rectification’.8 ‘What has distinguished the Left in all its historical forms over the last two centuries’, Norberto Bobbio has written, ‘is what I am inclined to define as the “ethos” (which is also “pathos”) of equality.’9 Today, this commitment – albeit if only rhetorical – to the principle of rectifying inequalities has changed only partially. No doubt the new social-democratic elites have partly renounced ‘classical’ postwar values and cultural codes, and it is also beyond dispute that the definition of ‘the social’ and ‘equality’ is significantly conditioned by endorsement of the neoliberal option. But notwithstanding this redefinition, social democrats have not abandoned their preferred weapon, which they have used for more than a century with unfailing consistency. This weapon is sizeable: ‘we represent the interests of the popular classes’. We social democrats of the early twenty-first century, who no longer represent a single class (and no longer wish to), who speak in the name of the people and the nation, in the name of competitiveness and markets, even enterprise, who have endorsed ‘sound’ management of the public finances, monetary stability as well as the discourse of ‘sacrifice’ – despite everything, we remain the best representatives of the disadvantaged sections of the population, and best placed to reduce inequalities. In this political genus, which is neither intellectually nor electorally extinct, social democrats possess and exploit their historical pedigree.
Now, in the light of the current social-democratic system of ‘normative beliefs’ (thus, in adopting and applying social-democratic criteria for evaluating social-democratic politics), the social-democratic performance of the last twenty-five years is disappointing. According to this system, prioritizing employment, arresting the current trend towards redistribution of wealth to the rich, defending (and rationalizing) the social state, and inventing novel, complementary social institutions to combat the new zones of poverty and insecurity – these ought to be the first task of the left and social democracy in office. Yet this is not the case or, when it is, only very inadequately. This is the major, clear lesson of the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s.
After twenty-five years of crises, renewals, and ideological and programmatic abrogation; after twenty-five years of groping, hesitation, and broken social promises; but equally, after twenty-five years of worthy efforts and new projects of a left-wing or ‘solidaristic’ nature, things are now clear: nothing shattering is to be expected from social democracy’s corner. Hence we should not surrender what we have for some fanciful alternative. Through its ‘unprecedented accommodation with capitalism’,10 social democracy has in practice abandoned its ‘rectifying project’. For a political family that constructed its profile and physiognomy (its revolutionary historical physiognomy and its postwar reformist, managerial physiognomy) around the social question, this is an extraordinary development. ‘With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again,’ says the Sermon on the Mount. Social democracy is a force that no longer respects its own ‘measure’ (i.e. the ‘rectifying’ project). It no longer performs ‘its role’. Social democracy today, modernized social democracy, appears to be incapable of an effective response to a supremely central question of advanced modernity: the social question.
The transformation of social democracy is profound for another reason. It is the result of a prolonged political evolution, a dynamic of de-re-composition which, while it is not linear (far from it), dates back at least to the 1960s.
Depending on the country concerned, different actors and factors have advertently or inadvertently contributed to this: the student movements of the 1960s; the resurgence of industrial conflict towards the end of the same decade and the crisis of mass trade-unionism; feminism; changes in the audiovisual landscape; the economic crisis; European integration; globalization; the influence of neoliberalism; the emergence of the ecological movement; the self-assertion of the ‘new cultural class’; the expansion of the middle classes and transformation of the ‘labouring classes’; and, obviously, the collapse of communism. These influences have exercised contradictory attractions. Consequently, the movement of de-re-composition has not been unidirectional. The new social-democratic elites typically derive from the student movement, and have left-wing origins. As Donald Sassoon has written: ‘Neo-revisionists often originated from the first “New Left”, and had been deeply influenced by the new individualist politics of the 1960s and 1970s.’11 Contrariwise, it is also characteristic that another section of the social-democratic elites, notably those who occupy key positions in the economic administration of current left-wing governments, derives from the very conservative economic establishment. All these contradictory origins and influences have figured in the subtle and complex mechanism of social-democratic redefinition and, ultimately, overhaul. But they operated on a terrain – in reality, a common denominator – which was not simply ideological: the progressive weakening of the ‘supporting institutions’ and ‘supporting social base’ of historical social democracy. The revisionist ardour of the contemporary social-democratic elites was not slow to latch on to the electoral downturn of the 1980s – and legitimate itself.12
The recasting of social democracy was thus a slow, pragmatic process. It unfolded in the absence of a hegemonic model to act as an exemplum and possibly a locomotive (like the SPD at the beginning of the twentieth century, the SAP in the 1930s, the British Labour Party in the late 1940s or, in its own way, the French Union of the Left or the SAP again in the 1970s). It was conducted in disorderly fashion, marked by perplexity, doubt, sometimes even euphoria. Retrospectively, the change certainly seems coherent, systematic, inevitable. But from day to day, as the real actors made decisions, ambivalence, double language, internal conflict, and stop-go prevailed.
The overhaul of social democracy in the absence of a hegemonic model was the product of a largely defensive adaptation to the new economic, social and cultural situation of advanced capitalism (although that adaptation subsequently assumed an offensive form, as with supporters of the ‘third way’). Reduction of the diversity in European socialism since the 1980s – Pascal Perrineau has spoken in this context of a socialist ‘monoculture’13 – was likewise the result of a defensive adaptation. Today’s convergence is, in large part, the product of the ‘banalization’ of the left (e.g. the end of the striking specificity of the Scandinavian model, whose prototype was the SAP; of the Austrian model; of the British model – Labour is becoming a party like all the rest, while remaining different from them; of the Greek ‘populist’ model of the 1970s or 1980s; or, in another register, of the PCI). The recasting – and convergence – derives more from the dilution of the strong ‘models’ that structured the postwar socialist/social-democratic family than from a general, aggressively reformist philosophy for the establishment of a new social-democratic model.
Given this framework of gradual, pragmatic reform, the social democracy of the 1980s, already in full de-re-composition, was changing before the supporters of the ‘third way’, or ‘social-democratic monetarism’,14 took over the helm. A number of the reforms and revisions bruited by the new social democracy had been largely set in train, or completed, before the ‘new’ social democrats came to power in the socialist parties (managerial competence, practical adherence to the anti-interventionist macro-economic consensus, highlighting of the theme of ‘modernity’, openness to the middle classes, progressive loosening of the link with the trade unions, slow redistribution of intra-organizational power, abandonment of the language of class).
Towards the second half of the 1990s, all these developments accelerated and started to converge, compounding their effects. The major innovation made by supporters of the new social democracy consisted in the deepening and acceleration of reform and revision. Taking an aggressive and often iconoclastic turn, this was the particular contribution of the ‘modernizers’. The ‘post-pessimistic’, new social democracy of the late 1990s is the direct, worthy heir of the ‘pessimistic’ social democracy of the 1980s.
Formalized by Anthony Giddens, Blair’s ‘third way’ is the most audacious (and eccentric) formulation of the new social-democratic spirit. Because of the radicalism of his initiative, Blair holds centre-stage in the drama of this long revision. He is, however, neither the originator nor the designer. Before him came Kinnock, Smith, and also Mitterrand, Rocard, Gonzales, Carlsson, Vranitsky. As Colin Hay and Mathew Wilson have emphasized, the British ‘third way’ is mainly ‘a post hoc rationalisation for a reform trajectory established long before’. At the same time it represents ‘a flexible repertoire of legitimating rhetoric’.15 But it is more than that. Conferring coherence and perspective on the new social-democratic reformism, this ‘post hoc rationalisation’ has greatly contributed to the emergence and consolidation of the new definition – and new self-consciousness – of European social democracy. The ‘third way’ forcefully captured the new social-democratic spirit, theorized from the outset as a necessary, dazzling irruption of ‘modernism’ faced with a ‘past’ regarded as anachronistic and well-nigh provincial. The ‘third way’ did not, however, unleash the great movement of revision (and modernization), which had been begun in Britain and Europe long before.
The overall social-democratic cartography is changing (and everywhere in the same direction): that is the essential change. Whether we want to call it the ‘third way’ or something else is merely a matter of terminology. But to identify this global change with its most ‘right-wing’ and possibly most formulated and aggressive version – Blair’s ‘third way’ – is to reduce its import and impact. To identify this change with the ‘third way’, a variant of the social-democratic dynamic of modernization that universalizes British specificity, is to underestimate a political groundswell to which social democracy in western Europe has ceded in very different forms.
Overestimating the import of the British road within European socialism also renders the diversity of the latter unintelligible. Gérard Grunberg has written:
Despite the undeniable convergence, the national peculiarities of the different European socialist parties have not disappeared. The cultures of the French, German and British parties, to take these three examples, remain distinct in numerous respects. Whether in relation to economic liberalism, the role of the state, public services, the political construction of Europe, the relation with left-wing forces – the Communist Party in France – or to institutions. Each party remains primarily a national party … the public spaces are national … as are the electorates.16
Essentially, the tension between diversity and convergence – the second widely prevailing over the first, if we consider the extraordinary richness of the socialist cultures and structures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – indicates that there is not one, but several ‘third ways’, which share a common matrix while differing significantly from one another.
Thus, if the dynamic of transformation is universal (and doubly so, embracing all aspects of social-democratic identity and all countries); if it began well before the ‘new’ social democrats’ arrival in power, then the new profile of contemporary social democracy is not an episode, some dazzling tactical feat or pyrotechnics. This profile has been developed patiently, by a slow and continuous apprenticeship. It thus possesses continuity, or at least a certain continuity. It is endowed with ‘historicity’ because it recapitulates, clarifies, highlights and, above all, reformulates the results of previous experience. This imparts a certain political depth to it.
Moreover, and above all, this new profile is balanced and, in the last analysis, coherent. The new physiognomy of social democracy is supported by a triple coherence: between its discourse in opposition (now ‘moderate’ compared with the traditionally left-leaning discourse of the past) and practice in government (similarly, and traditionally, moderate); between its resolutely catch-all programmatic/ideological profile (the most catch-all format in the entire history of social democracy) and the interclassist structure of its organization and electorate (likewise, by far the most interclassist in social-democratic history); and finally, between programmatic minimalism and ‘electoral maximalism’.17 Contemporary social democracy is a force in equilibrium. And in all likelihood, because it is based on this ‘triple’ coherence, the new social-democratic identity is not merely conjunctural in character.
Obviously, following a governmental failure or depending on the context of intra- and inter-party competition, social democracy could once again be destabilized. It could thus become, as I have stressed above, less or more liberal, less or more ‘new politics’, less or more bourgeois, less or more left-wing: it all depends on the intra- and extra-organizational context of partisan competition. But it could adopt this ‘more or less’ without really disowning – without fundamentally changing – the current framework of its ideological, programmatic, organizational or social references.
Contrariwise, to change fundamentally would now be to imperil its whole equilibrium, acquired in the course of a painful journey. It would be to call into question a multilevel structure that has been established slowly, and to challenge not a particular leadership group or ideology (which, after all, is not so difficult), but an entire mode of partisan construction (and reconstruction). Any retreat would appear far from easy. Social democracy is no longer a political force ‘in transition’.
Social democracy has, to a certain extent, broken the ‘organic’ links that united it with certain social groups (workers, left-wing intellectuals and, later, a section of public-sector employees). Contemporary social democracy is largely constructed as a minimal regroupment, essentially restricted to the electoral sphere, and incapable of eliciting and organizing intensive support from the groups in question. Social-democratic self-identity is currently more political, and a good deal less ideological (in the sense of adhesion to a ‘major’ or ‘minor’ ideological system), sociological or cultural. It is a weak identity. Correlatively, the autonomy of social democracy with respect to its environment, and its capacity to control it, has declined dramatically. Social democracy is no longer constructed as a ‘strong institution’ (Angelo Panebianco), or as a ‘great matrix of political identity and culture’ (Marc Lazar), and has not been for a long time. Its cohesion – which, in a sense, is ‘postmodern’, since it is based on weak integrating links – stabilizes the new social-democratic edifice downwards, on the basis of the minimum minimorum.
In that the ‘reserved’ territory (social, ideological, organizational, cultural) of social democracy has diminished, the political enterprise aspect of its identity is strengthened significantly. Today more than ever, social democracy depends on the quality of its political appeal (leadership, candidates, tactical coups, programme, record in government, etc.), and on the conjuncture of partisan competition. This has electoral consequences. The gain in tactical flexibility (a weapon in electoral competition), which is attributable to enhanced leadership autonomy (‘innovation from above’) and the ideological and programmatic flexibility of a less ‘integrated’ structure, is accompanied by a very substantial loss in stability. An electorally unstable force can suffer significant and rapid losses and sometimes, just as rapidly, regain the lost ground. It is thus incapable of being relatively consistently successful over a long period. The new social democracy is electorally vulnerable. However, thanks to its greater ‘adaptability’, it is capable of flexible strategic responses to counteract this vulnerability, by taking advantage of its setbacks. Flexibility is a pronounced characteristic of contemporary socialist parties (both ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’). The most important aspect of the new social-democratic programmatic profile is possibly not the profile itself, but the fact that it has been aggressively (and fairly rapidly) adopted. This explains why the ‘new’ social democracy displays greater openness to new sensibilities, whether left, right, or ‘neither left nor right’ (e.g. feminist ideas, minority rights, ecology, neoliberal ideas).
Contemporary social democracy is ‘slight’ and far from compact (ideologically and organizationally), flexible, adaptable and modest (programmatically and strategically), unstable and scarcely cohesive (electorally). It therefore lacks the ambition, the vision, and the solid bases seriously to challenge established structures of power and influence, national or international. Hence its quasi-general resignation to the ongoing neoliberal globalization; its passivity about the direction of European unification; and, finally, its active participation in the cultural ‘counter-revolution’ of the market – apart from certain aspects – as necessary, useful and inevitable. Social democracy today is not capable of political and ideological hegemony. Yet this ‘slight’, flexible and modest social democracy is coherent in its ‘slightness’, flexibility and modesty. It will therefore find it very difficult to depart from the organizational, sociological and political orbit defined by its current identity, which tends towards the ‘entrepreneurial’. To regard the new social-democratic identity as circumstantial and ephemeral is to misjudge the whole logic of a transformation of which this identity is simply the crystallization.
The mutation of the social-democratic/socialist family signals the beginning of a new stage of social-democratic history. The active role of the state, and the attribution of a real and/or symbolic centrality to the promotion of working-class interests – core tenets of a long heritage – have been largely abandoned by contemporary social democracy. This dual core, which ensured a basic continuity in a long tradition marked by more breaks than continuities, has been largely removed by conscious, explicit adherence to a moderately, but manifestly, neoliberal mode of regulation. Social democracy certainly still seeks to ally in one project the celebrated ‘invisible hand’ of liberalism with the ‘visible hand’ of the state. But the balance between the two has changed. Moreover, judging from the governmental experiences of social democracy today, the content of state interventionism (which remains operative, but is mainly deregulatory interventionism) is only partially integrated into the postwar tradition of the reformist-redistributive state – when it is not breaking with it completely.
The modernization and revisions in progress are neither the most spectacular, nor the most significant, in the long history of social democracy. But the waning of these core tenets of the social-democratic legacy threatens to breach the last line of resistance, the last line of continuity. This serves to distinguish the current revisionism from all previous initiatives en bloc. This decisive ideological and political leap is encouraged and strengthened by the trend towards marginalization of the working-class and popular element in social democracy’s institutional and ideological subsystem. By contrast, it is discouraged by the maintenance, albeit obviously considerably weakened, of the trade-union link; by the – still! – significant working-class presence in social-democratic electorates, and by social democracy’s electoral anchorage in the public sector: factors that preclude adoption of a ‘pure’ neoliberal approach.
However, the extent of social-democratic ‘revision’ and transformation (the two are not identical, revision being a crucial dimension of the more general dynamic of transformation) does not result in a new structure of political-social polarities, as was the case during the transition from the liberal ‘left’ to the socialist left. The social-democratic mutation does not involve a radical ‘refoundation’ of the social-political struggle issuing from the Industrial Revolution and the capital-labour compromise, rather, it involves an important rearrangement of the terms of the latter to the advantage of the market, the middle classes and enterprise. Hence it is not the world turned upside down, the collapse of a world, or some clear and sharp transition to a new order.
This is why the new social democracy has not succeeded in equipping itself with strong symbolic resources, in appealing to a ‘reformist imaginary’,18 whatever its content. This is also why the labour of ideological and theoretical innovation hitherto undertaken by what is called the ‘new’ social democracy, however iconoclastic, only partially challenges the priority of the theme of equality. The new social-democratic ‘reformism’ is, in the end, a reformism of resignation: either it is not integrated into an overall strategy, or it is integrated (albeit only partially) into the opponent’s reformist project. It does not ‘make sense’ of social-democratic action; it does not generate a sense of the left.
Nevertheless, social democracy, tacitly or explicitly ‘freed’ from its own working-class and popular commitments, and its own reformist project, has once again ruptured its own historical continuity, just as it did in the first decade of the twentieth century and in 1914, in the interwar period, and the 1950s. To borrow something Eustache Kouvélakis said in a different context, it has thus contributed to the ‘irruption of a new temporality’.19 The ‘imperative of rectification’ has certainly not been completely abandoned, and the more mixed cases of the gauche plurielle in France or the Scandinavian social democrats (particularly the Swedes, who are less unfaithful to their popular lineage) oblige us to qualify this assertion. Obviously, too, we can find in contemporary social democracy tendencies that have remained true to the working-class and reformist vocation of this great political force. But none of this challenges the ‘preponderant’ trend. With the social democrats’ neoliberal turn, with their catch-all roaming, with the new contacts they have established with the world of enterprise, and with the collapse of communist legitimacy, the greatest project of the twentieth century – the ‘project of politicization’ derived from working-class and popular culture – has been defeated, in both its reformist and its revolutionary variants. The political class conflict on which the left – and social democracy – constructed its formidable historical (and electoral) dynamic has thus been repressed. And this despite the fact, confirmed by this work, that social class continues to structure electoral choice, albeit less strongly and securely than in the past.
‘The twentieth century is likely to be known as the century of the worker,’ John Dunlop, US Labor Secretary, said in 1978.20 Everything suggests that this will not be true of the twenty-first century. Politically speaking, as a result of the social-democratic defection and the formidable defeat of communism, the working-class and popular universe, socially fragmented and weakened, is becoming largely ‘privatized’. For the first time in at least a century, the zone of poverty and social insecurity has ceased to be something that is assumed to have its own party representation (or representations). It is no longer represented effectively, or is represented solely via trade-unionism. The social-democratic (and communist) retreat creates within class society a zone that is politically (not socially) a class zone of quasi-non-classes, and within the political system a zone of quasi-non-representation. The ‘minimalist’ discourse of contemporary social democracy, and its ‘minimalist’ administration of the social question – analysed throughout this study – precisely help to shape this zone into a zone of non-representation. The absence of a clearly defined left-wing differentia specifica in economic and social affairs cumulatively strips the right/left divide, which encapsulates political adversity in west European capitalism, of part of its force and impact, for it creates within this divide a major zone of non-division. Thus, the marked deterioration in the bond of representation between the left and popular strata is the most weighty historical consequence of the new social-democratic profile and ‘compromise’; and its most important ‘window of vulnerability’, its Achilles heel.
If the working-class movement has lost the centrality it had in the Fordist epoch, this is not simply the result of social democracy’s neo-capitalist turn and the communist shipwreck. To a great extent, the political formulations and strategic options of contemporary social democrats merely ‘theorize’ and ‘politicize’ the diminution – whether passing or enduring, only history will decide – of the political potential of the popular classes, and particularly of the working class. This class, the ‘subjective agency’ of socialism, has not been conquered in a direct political confrontation – as the Parisian proletariat was in 1848, for example. Nor has it been ‘betrayed’ by leaders disloyal to the cause of the working class (as in a sense with MacDonald, who deserted Labour in 1931). On the contrary, it has (as Robert Castel stresses) been undermined, circumvented, outflanked, and finally weakened in its potential for collective mobilization by a profound sociological transformation in the structure of the wage-earning class and working conditions.21 That said, the formulations and options of the new social democracy have, in turn, contributed to structuring, accelerating, and finally ‘producing’ the political peripheralization of the popular classes. Nevertheless, this peripheralization is not a simple party matter. Moreover, it is independent of the fact that the working-class movement ‘seeks to restructure its own resources so that it can survive as a contender on an increasingly forbidding terrain’.22
So is the new social democracy the other face of the right, a right that dare not speak its name? Various aspects of contemporary social democracy are more than a mere ‘left-wing tint’ (social measures, a more consultative approach to economic policy, some consideration of trade-union interests and, in other spheres, a more environmentally friendly policy, a greater openness to cultural liberalism). Moreover, the social counterpart to liberal macroeconomic policies would be less easy to conceive and apply without social democracy’s popular and reformist tradition (and the expectations aroused by it), and without its rootedness (albeit considerably weakened) in the popular classes and trade unions. Contemporary social democracy, a widely neoliberalized social democracy, seeks modestly to mitigate the most extreme effects of neoliberalism.
I therefore find it difficult to accept, as it has been said of New Labour, that the new social democracy ‘has no substance and represents nothing but submission to the right’.23 Certainly, to use Rand Smith’s classification once again, social democracy has graduated from a ‘market-modifying’ to a ‘market-adapting’ strategy (with New Labour positioned closer to a ‘market-embracing’ than a ‘market-adapting’ strategy). But if such a strategy ‘accepts the market as the final arbiter … [it] allows more time for adjustment and is certainly more labor friendly than the market-embracing approach’.24 With his theorem that ‘the only full employment policy is austerity’, Hayek has not become the social democrats’ favourite prophet. And the shade of Keynes continues to haunt several of them (though certainly not the British), even if the Keynesian dream has been abandoned. Contemporary social democracy is not identified with the right (even if it subscribes to the economic paradigm of the right) – just as the forces of the right and centre were not identified with, or ‘subject’ to, social democracy during the trente glorieuses, years of the social-democratic consensus.
To argue, however, that ‘it is absurd to suggest that the parties of the centre-left have rejected the social democratic tradition’,25 is profoundly to misjudge the extent of the change in social-democratic policies. There cannot be social-democratic policies (‘new’ or ‘old’) that do not reduce inequalities (even moderately), and promote the interests of disadvantaged groups and social rights (even modestly). Now, whatever the rhetoric, articulated in schizophrenic fashion between two registers; whatever the success of the tightrope act to which contemporary social democrats daily and systematically devote themselves, they are nevertheless confronted with a problem that is intellectually, socially and economically insoluble: the acceptance of market regulation and the practical promotion of left-wing social and economic objectives are fundamentally incompatible. And here the analogy with centre-right politics during the trente glorieuses loses all relevance. For in largely adopting Keynesian policy and the social state, the postwar right did not abandon or ‘betray’ the interests of its natural social base (big capital and the middle classes). At the time, the world of enterprise benefited from the social-democratic consensus as much as – if not more than – the world of labour. By contrast, in taking for its precept ‘outside the liberal club, no salvation!’,26 and not wanting to touch the middle classes, contemporary social democracy has largely abandoned the objective of equality and the interests of popular strata. Social democracy has ‘converted executive alternation into “un jeu à risque nul” for capital’.27 Widespread political cynicism among the European electorates, the distancing from the working-class and popular electorate, the extreme right’s penetration into the new plebeian arenas, conflicts with the trade unions – these are not portents, but signs confirming this abandonment and this jeu à risque nul. And that is a real break in the social-democratic tradition.
Obviously, whoever says modernization says break. Modernization is, by definition, a break in a political and ideological trajectory. This break can signify ‘correction’ of the trajectory; or take the form of a global reexamination of it. In the first case, modernization is a significant adjustment within a tradition; in the second, the modernization is outside the tradition. Obviously, the boundary between the two possibilities – and alternatives – is never as straight as a die, and establishing the ‘critical threshold’ is difficult. But the trend of the last quarter-century permits of little doubt. Everything indicates that at least since the beginning of the 1980s, social democracy has entered into a crucial phase of global re-examination (not adaptation and adjustments). Rather than being an attenuated version of traditional social democracy, what the ‘social-liberalism’ of contemporary social democracy is, and what it proposes, is an attenuated version of liberalism, supplemented by some important ‘new politics’ ingredients (and sometimes some very ‘old politics’, ‘law-and-order’ ingredients). Moreover, the electoral, organizational and sociological mechanics that precede, accompany, or follow this revisionist dynamic lead progressively – but not inexorably – to a global redefinition of social democracy’s innermost physiognomy. Given this context of general transformation, any deepening of the renovation in progress will – conclusively – render it a modernization outside the tradition, in a clear break with the social-democratic tradition.
Notes
1.Gerassimos Moschonas, La Gauche française (1972–1988) à la lumière du paradigme social-démocrate. Partis de coalition et coalitions de partis dans la compétition electorale, doctoral thesis, University of Paris II, 1990; La Social-démocratie de 1945 à nos jours, Montchrestien, Paris 1994.
2.Alain Bergounioux and Bernard Manin, Le Régime social-démocrate, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1989, p. 184.
3.Karl Ove Moene and Michael Wallerstein, ‘How Social Democracy Worked: Labor-Market Institutions’, Politics and Society, vol. 23, no., 1995, p. 186.
4.Seraphim Seferiades, Working-Class Movements (1780s-1930s). A European Macro-Historical Analytical Framework and a Greek Case Study, PhD dissertation, Columbia University 1998, p. 66.
5.Patrick Seyd, ‘New Parties/New Politics? A Case Study of the British Labour Party’, Party Politics, vol. 5, no. 3, 1999, p. 401.
6.Seferiades, Working-Class Movements, p. 67.
7.In the past, structures and actors with a different rationality from that of the party leadership (trade unions, associations, sections of the party membership) were in a position to contribute – if only by exerting contrary pressures – to the formulation of the ‘mainstream movement discourse’. Its final formulation was thus more ‘collective’ than it is today.
8.Steven Lukes, ‘What is Left? Essential Socialism and the Urge to Rectify’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 March 1992.
9.Norberto Bobbio, ‘At the Beginning of History’, New Left Review, no. 231, 1998, p. 84.
10.Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English Genius, Verso, London and New York 1993, p. x.
11.Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, I.B. Tauris, London 1996, p. 736.
12.The ‘weightiest’ argument in the arsenal of the new social democrats is electoral: in fact, in the majority of cases the electoral downturn preceded the aggressive ideological and programmatic turn to the ‘third way’ and neo-capitalism, and the return to power precisely followed this shift. Thus political time, the sequence of electoral highs and lows, fuels and strengthens the argument in favour of the positions of the new social democracy – something that is readily forgotten by left-wing critics. Similarly, the left turn of the French PS was largely encouraged and legitimated by the severe electoral failures of ‘monetarist socialism’ (as well as by the great social mobilization of December 1995).
13.Pascal Perrineau, in Gérard Grunberg, Vers un socialisme européen?, Hachette, Paris 1997, p. 120.
14.The term derives from Seraphim Seferiades, ‘Social Democratic Strategies in the Twentieth Century’, in Katsoulis Ilias, ed., The ‘New’ Social Democracy at the Turn of the Century, Sideris, Athens 2001 (in Greek).
15.Colin Hay and Mathew Wilson, ‘Neither Here Nor There? New Labour’s Third Way Adventism’, in Lothar Funk, ed., The Economics and Politics of the Third Way, LIT, Hamburg 1999, p. 178.
16.Grunberg, Vers un socialisme européen?, p. 123.
17.Elliott, Labourism and the English Genius, p. 197.
18.Zaki Laïdi, ‘Qu’est-ce que la troisième voie?’, Esprit, no. 251, 1999, p. 46.
19.Eustache Kouvélakis, Philosophie et révolution de Kant à Marx, doctoral thesis, University of Paris II, 1998, p. 2; Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 2001.
20.Quoted in Ethan Kapstein, Sharing the Wealth: Workers and the World Economy, Norton and Company, New York and London 1999, p. 66.
21.Robert Castel, ‘Pourquoi la classe ouvrière a-t-elle perdu la partie?’, Actuel Marx, no. 26, 1999, pp. 16, 23.
22.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. 225.
23.Quoted in Geoff Mulgan, ‘Whinge and a Prayer’, Marxism Today, November/December 1998, p. 15.
24.Smith, The Left’s Dirty Job, pp. 11, 211.
25.Mulgan, ‘Whinge and a Prayer’, p. 15.
26.Viviane Forrester, L’horreur économique, Fayard, Paris 1996, p. 56.
27.Serge Halimi, quoted in Gregory Elliott, ‘Velocities of Change’, Historical Materialism, no. 2, 1998, p. 52.