Social democrats and capitalism

“political near-incoherence”

How about – Dissent is a dead magazine walking? After supporting the invasion of Iraq, they’ve plumbed the depths of irrelevancy.

I think that in some sense you’re asking politicians to do something they can’t do. This seems to me to be squarely in the “following dead economists” category. Ever since Marxist economics was largely discredited, for social democrats to have a radical sense of transformative possibilities with regard to the market is going to require an economist who gives some sort of framework for a sense of transformative possibilities.

Of course this may well be the cue for various people to haul out their favorite obscure economist and say “Look, this person could have been the next Marx, if only the system had been able to recognize him or her”, and blame it on ideological resistance rather than the failure of people to provide a real alternative. But it’s not my sense that the heterodox economists are really that heterodox anymore. Once you get to the point of making the right-wingers progress from economics 101 to a sophomore-level course — admitting that market failures routinely exist, and so on — I don’t see a bold new framework as such.

Well, actually. I think that some combination of environmental economics for certain things and post-scarcity for certain other things is probably going to be where it’s at. But the social democrats can be almost as bad as everyone else in this regard, what with their connection to “workers” and “work”.

Henry,
I’m not exactly sure what “social democracy” refers to — something like progressivism as many current contributors to The American Prospect view it? This? If my sense about it is correct, at least in the 1980s, most American social democrats were concerned with (a) spreading knowledge about Marxist versions of critique, (b) reducing the influence of anticommunism, and (c) supporting certain movements opposed to racism, etc. I don’t know what changes the end of the Cold War brought (not to mention postmodernism, if such a thing exists). Were there any other organizations supporting people who would have liked to call themselves “social democrats”?

Cool! I not only messed up the italics in my own comment, I turned your contributor list and blogroll into italics too. Probably this comment will fix it. I’m pretty sure it looked fine in preview though.

Looking back at that first post, I should have put “anticommunism” in scare quotes, or written ‘reflexive “anticommunism'”, rather than assume the word means the same thing to everybody and everybody of good faith knows how what to think of those who use it with application to themselves.

9:Ooh, I really like you Roger. Stick around.

“Consent of the governed” “governed” meaning the minority, or even majority in the instances where the polity is radically factionalized, is a necessary condition for democracy. In circumstances like Iraq until recently, if a sufficiently empowered minority does not consent to be ruled, democracy is impossible. “Majority rule” will not work. It will not work, as democracy, even if the 55% has all the powers legitimate process can afford them.

At such times, in such circumstances, process and law become unaffordable luxuries of the nostalgic and sentimental.

Harry,
From your description, I don’t see why left-liberalism or progressivism, well within the comfort zone of large enough segments of the Democratic Party, aren’t “social democratic.” If I understand what social democratic parties are in Europe and the UK, a major difference would, however, be a willingness to work with parties to the left, extending possibly at times to the Communists, which as we all know isn’t an option in US politics. There may also be some style differences, which I don’t seem to be able to express without coming across as snarky.

The notion that Dissent supported the war in Iraq belongs in the realm of political fiction, not in an honest discussion of politics.

Having worked closed with Michael Harrington for a number of years, I think it is fair to say that while his interventions in the world of American politics could be fairly and accurately described as social democratic, his theoretical ruminations would have to be classified as democratic socialist, with a tinge of Marxian utopianism. In this context, the distinction is important and real, and one Harrington himself would have made in describing his own politics. Part of the problem with Berman’s essay is her failure to recognize the disjunction between Harrington the political actor and Harrington the political philosopher. The political actor was a man who coined the term the “left wing of the possible”; the political philosopher was a man who still waxed poetic over the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.

I probably should have kept quiet if I wasn’t willing to go into as much detail as I really would have to. The most concrete example that comes to mind is Martin Amis proclaiming his superiority over American writers who leave the neighborhood of their childhood as soon as they “make it big,” saying “when an English writer succeeds, he buys a new typewriter.”

Henry, I think it’s unlikely that most people will trust grand solutions now, due to the enormous complexity of the world system. But as to where “transformative possibilities might emerge from,” it’s possible to pick out a few things which are clearly occurring, and which are bound together to create a new psychological effect and social evolution:

(1) Computer media is instantaneous and two-way, not scheduled and one-way like the old mass media, and that means a lot. Events in the world are more quickly and widely seen, and more easily transparent to inspection and personal evaluation. The number, the similarities and the repetitions of the events become redundant, and so people become readier for intellectual syntheses.

(2) Materially-aggrandizing egotism is becoming seen as a poisonous stage of life — as opposed to a permanent disability — because of #1, and because of the rise of psychology and, curiously, the rise of psych meds.

(3) The effects of wildlife ecosystem diminution and destruction is making people realize that we are not going to have anything left which was not originated by human beings. This makes a profound impression, even upon those who do not consider themselves to be nature-lovers, because something which should be preserved, and some sense of the other-than-human, is being lost.

(4) It turns out that the sources of efficiency are not quite what mainstream economics teaches they are. It turns out that, like new tools or new machines, new institutions such as universal healthcare can cut costs and make life much better than otherwise. Overweening bureaucratic power, hidden decisions and lost innovation can be mitigated by better institutional design — partly by using #1 above, better transparency.

President Obama appears to understand that transparency is going to be a key to real transformation. This is a continuation of the line of thought pursued by the Founding Fathers. His supporters would do well to help him out on this, because it is much more important than the cynics realize.

I don’t think it’s possible to predict where this is all going, but I will guess one thing: there will be a redefinition of how money is to be created, and it won’t be solely restricted to bank deposit creation. (Hazel Henderson, a brilliant, prescient observer and critic, predicted this about 20 or 30 years ago.)

Come on bianca, if Martin Amis is a social democrat I’m a monkey’s uncle. There is no world in which Martin Amis is a social democrat and Michael Harrington isn’t. Amis is just a ….

Oh, right wing Brits, despite their Atlanticism, are frequently far more anti-American than lefties (though as an American living for 2 years in the UK my wife encountered a kind of visceral, and mostly remarkably ignorant, anti-americanism from many quarters). When I moved to America (1985), the only people of my acquaintance who expressed positive views about America were Marxists and social democrats (Tories, third worldy lefties, feminists, all completely contemptuous). This isn’t the place (or rather the time, I have some meetings to prepare for) to go into detail, but social democracy is quite specific, and I would say that relatively few of the intellectual literati belong within it (certainly not Amis). Having finally read the Berman piece that Henry linked to I don’t think it is as bizarre as I did think to exclude Harrington. Anyway the true founders of British social democracy (Attlee and Bevin) were hard-line Atlanticists.

Finally, Amis’s autobiography is an amazing read, for several reasons, and I recommend it wholeheartedly (it was recommended to me because he suffers a lot of dental pain, and I am known to be obsessed with dental care, but that is only one of many fascinating aspects of it).

John Emerson, Greenspan’s push quotes are great. You could add:

“This was supposed to be about how only the few SUPERIOR people can create money disconnected from value! If we can keep them arguing over whether markets can be self-adjusting, we’ll win, again!”

Tracy W, to my mind the business cycle is itself evidence that the private sector alone is not the most efficient allocator of capital.

However, the experiment you mention will, of course, never be run. In spite of the seemingly incorrigible delusions of Fresh water economists, the U.S., since the Great Depression – which is, of course, a great monument to the 20s delusion that the private sector is the most efficient allocator of capital – has created an economic system in which, in good years and bad, the government has a strong place. Indicative of this, I think, is employment, which is certainly a telling parameter of economic activity. Since the later forties, the number of people employed by the government on all levels in the U.S. has gone from 13 percent to around 17 – last I looked, that is 22 million people in the U.S. If the average unemployment rate for this period is around 5-6 percent, then we get the employment share for the private sphere of around 80 percent. At the moment, of course, it is more like 73 or 75 percent.

To me, the meaning of this is simple. There is not and there won’t be a developed economy that is not mixed. If the U.S., the most laissez faire of the developed nations, tacitly recognizes the inability of the private sector to pull more than about 80 percent of the economy, I take that as strong evidence for classifying sentences about the most efficient allocator of capital as nonsense. As in many economic “models”, ceteris paribas does all the heavy lifting, while fantasy is translated into equations that translate a set of class interests into mythology. Economics is a branch of literature, and in nothing is this more true than the production of the bad poetry that economists so fondly call models
Of course, nonsense refers to the meaningful content of the efficiency phrase. Rather than an observation about a social fact, the phrase is propaganda meant to push forward a set of programs, the end result of which is to favor established power. In this way, it gains a social meaning, one on par with “the divine right of kings”.

This is an interestingly strong statement. Anyone else agree with it?

Well, unless you can tolerate masses of people begging on the streets or dying from diseases, it’s quite obvious that we also need other ways of allocating capital.

Sebastian, since the whole frickin comment goes on to “interpret’ alone, yeah, I guess your observation is right.

Finally, Amis’s autobiography is an amazing read, for several reasons, and I recommend it wholeheartedly

Off an a tangent I’d be interested in why you think this is so (I thought otherwise, but I don’t think I want to argue my case).

I still think that people aren’t really looking at the full range of what is possible — that helps one to see why the current options on offer seem so restrained. Other than, say, Lee Arnold’s comments in 21 above, a lot of this is still about concepts like unemployment. It seems pretty obvious to me that what we want is a new system in which everyone is fed and has health care and so on, and not many people are really employed in the classic way. Employment means economic activity, and the world is pretty much filled to the brim with economic activity which greater productivity means isn’t really needed except in order to prop up ever-growing distributional inequities. Too much of social democratic sentiment seems to me to be like people talking about how to organize one more good old-style cavalry charge into the barbed wire and machine guns.

“world is pretty much filled to the brim with economic activity which greater productivity means isn’t really needed except in order to prop up ever-growing distributional inequities.”

Ummmm… yeah, tell that to people in poor countries.

Who you calling ‘left’? But you know, it might just be the case that in order to feed everyone and give them health care, you might have to actually ‘produce’ those things with a thing called ‘productivity’. Not my fault if one of your sentences contradicts the next.

notsneaky – “If by capital you mean physical capital than the traditional Keynesian view would be more that the business cycle is evidence of inefficient allocation of labor.”

No. See the chase after high yield that gave us, in the twenties, the Florida real estate boom and the boom in ‘cartels”, or the 00s, which gave us the boom in “financial innovations” – which, of course, I’d put down under your convenient rent seeking category. And of course, it isn’t some fabulous coincidence that, after the Great Depression, every developed country established a heavy government presence in the economy. Of course, there are reasons that the governance of any developed society should get more expensive – governance has to adapt, after all. But the structural presence of the government has much more to do with the fact that the private sector can neither provide full employment nor, in an efficient and equal way, a number of social goods – retirement, education, health care. The attempt over the last thirty years to make retirement a matter of the private sphere only is a nice experiment in how much the private sphere can do. You can look at the collapse of the Chilean social security system, which sucked, anyway, in terms of providing decent retirement for the working closs, or of the 401(k) supplement, as pretty good evidence that the private sphere cannot allocate retirement units, so to speak, very well – it is much too volatile, and it cannot, through some alchemy, transform a negative externality into a profitmaker, however hard it tries.

But there is another, supply dimension that should be mentioned. Unfortunately, most discussions about government intervention in the economy end up as discussions of poverty or welfare, which overshadows the governments role in creating and adding dynamism to the residual. Again, it would be stupid to suggest that the question is whether the government or the private sphere should do all the work, but it is obvious that in the last decade, the private sphere in the U.S. has been increasingly unwilling to invest in long term R and D – unsurprisingly, in light of an atmosphere so heavily weighted towards short term yields. Surprisingly, given what we know about global warming, and given the political disasters and economic vulnerability inherent in the U.S. dependence on oil, there’s been no major endogenous move to transform this into an opportunity for new energy technologies. The SUV is a symbol not only of ecological blindness, but of an engineering dead end – this is the path technological innovation has gone down in American capitalism. It is mid as if, instead of railroads, the private sector in the mid nineteenth century had concerned itself solely with trying to make prettier horse drawn carriages.

“Again, it would be stupid to suggest that the question is whether the government or the private sphere should do all the work, but it is obvious that in the last decade, the private sphere in the U.S. has been increasingly unwilling to invest in long term R and D – unsurprisingly, in light of an atmosphere so heavily weighted towards short term yields. Surprisingly, given what we know about global warming, and given the political disasters and economic vulnerability inherent in the U.S. dependence on oil, there’s been no major endogenous move to transform this into an opportunity for new energy technologies. The SUV is a symbol not only of ecological blindness, but of an engineering dead end….”

The concept of “public goods” seems to be making a comeback in the US. The terminology isn’t the same as socialists might use, for practical reasons, but Obama is constantly talking about public goods. As this free market induced collapse works it’s way downward, the concept of what’s good for the community, the nation as a whole, will be moving front and center. Right now Obama refers to “down payments.” But what he’s talking about is government national policy taking a front burner role.

This will include a forward looking energy policy. It will include a strong move towards universal health care. It will include policies aimed at reducing income inequalities. There’s much stamping of feet by the opposition, but all the working and middle class need to be reminded of is the value of their private retirement accounts.

And an entire generation of Americans now believe the relationship between Wall Street and Washington has and continues to be poisonous. And they’re right. It will be a political opportunity Obama will not miss. Trust me.

Oops. I thought I’d erased that last paragraph. Consider it erased.

No, I’ve made a very good case for its relevance, I think. The argument is that any model that takes, as the ceteris paribus conditional, full employment, and uses it to argue against government spending is using a conditional that depends, very much, on government spending.
It is a simple argument. It is a bad poem.
You can like it or not, but pretending that it is not an argument is, I find, pretty typical of people who “don’t know what they are talking about.”

I don’t think it’s worth trying, Roger. I mean, as in my case, you could start to try to point out obvious things like greater productivity meaning that you don’t really need everyone to work in order to provide necessities for everyone, as long as those necessities are well distributed. And that currently the effort to keep everyone employed is mainly just going towards piling up more riches for rich people, beyond what the planet will support. And that we’d be better off just letting some people not work and supporting them in doing so. But why bother?

“I mean, as in my case, you could start to try to point out obvious things like greater productivity meaning that you don’t really need everyone to work in order to provide necessities for everyone, as long as those necessities are well distributed. ”

The problem here is ‘necessities’. We are fairly close to providing necessities for everyone already if you mean food, shelter, basic clothing, and maybe even things as non-necessary as cable television. If that was really all that progressives wanted, we’d be dangerously close to done especially in some of the European countries. It doesn’t even require massive further redistribution. You really can live on the dole in a number of countries and live much better than human beings have lived for most of the history of the human race.

But I don’t really believe that is all you want…

What’s wrong with being dangerously close to done? Of course, we haven’t started redistributing from Europe to Chad. The whole thing doesn’t make much sense if “talking to people in poor countries” means telling them that hey, the contemporary distribution of riches followed some kind of perfectly moral historical process and if they want anything they can get it from other poor people.

And the reason that such a large percentage of people want to work is because the safety net really isn’t developed well enough in most places so that they can live long-term without it. “Give the people what they want” is Newspeak if there is no good alternative.

I’m not sure that you can really count Sweden, it is more like a state in the US than a comparable STATE. It is largely at the mercy of what goes on around it. But if you want to compare France and Germany and the UK and the US and say that we could be any of those models, fine.

But again what is your real goal? It doesn’t require massive redistribution or levelling of incomes to get to the point where all the necessities are covered. Hell, if that is the endpoint I’m on board.

Sebastian, the point is that by keeping people in the richer countries on a treadmill — which is what “full employment” does — you’re exhausting the capabilities of the planet. People say un-thought-out things like “where is the food and health care going to come from if no one works?” as in this thread, but at the same time they implicitly seem to believe that all of this comes out of nowhere in the sense that you can just have more and more of it globally and never reach a limit.

In fact, given a choice, I’d bet that most people in rich countries would rather have a lot more leisure time than a second car or a bigger house. But if some people want to work really hard, great. They can have more monetary rewards and support everyone else. Even after redistribution, they will still end up with enough more than other people to give them social status, which is really mainly what this is about at this point in the rich countries.

The bit about no political will to go across national boundaries is, of course, just re-stating that there is no real international left right now. I don’t think that this is the product of some kind of facts about how societies work. I think it’s just ideology.

“Sebastian, the point is that by keeping people in the richer countries on a treadmill—which is what “full employment” does”

But we don’t. In quite a few richer countries you can go most of your life without working and still have the basics covered. So we could beef that up a little and there would still be plenty of room for rich people, including really really rich people. But I have trouble believing that you are really talking about the basics. (And there is a political problem. There will be incentive problems if enough people aren’t working, but still get to vote on what stuff they get from the government.) If you are really talking about just the basics, you could probably get a good consensus for aid. But I have the nagging thought that you either aren’t going to stop there, or are going to have a very very expansive view of the basics.

I’m not sure what Sebastian’s point is, or the point of conservative politics in the past 8 years. Conservatives will quickly dish up bogus hedonistics to tell you that the median household is doing better – 2 x, 10 x better – now than in the 70s. Which surely means that a milionaire is a 10 millionaire, a 10 millionaire is a 100 millionaire, etc. If half the wealth of the top 5 percent were simply expropriated, it would make no difference to their life styles. Hell, if the upper 5 percent merely held five percent of the national wealth, they would still be wealthy. So the question is: why the crazy protectiveness about them? The Russian revolution is not on the horizon.

Myself, I think the point is that we can’t afford, much longer, to be a developed country and one in which the income distribution mirrors Mexico or Turkey more than France or Germany. Our rich have become too expensive to keep.

I’m pretty sure nobody in a couple of generations has ever seen the politics that lies ahead in the U.S. as savings just evaporates, destroying the last thirty years of carefully cultivated ties between middle class america and the highflying investors on Wall Street. The next couple years will be good for socialistic solutions – typical of Dissent to advocate holding your punches at just this moment. Now is the time to punch away.

“Most people work because they want a big tv, second car, bigger house, steak dinner, etc. ” – while many an 18 year old boy thinks this, mostly no. Very few people work to get themselves the steak dinner – rather, it is steak for the family. Or saving up not to work, for retirement, with spouse. Taking care of a sick parent. Etc. It is very very rare that anybody is so alone that they work in order to accumulate stuff just for themselves. By and large, agents come with their connections, which is why methodological individualism is such a silly doctrine. It would probably surprise notsneaky that this very minute, in millions of households, kids are wolfing down meat they didn’t pay for and, at the end of the meal, their parents don’t charge them! Incredible, but true.

Roger – you need to compare the business cycle to some alternative. The market is of course less efficient than a world in which we have everything as good as it is now or better except no business cycle. And current wind turbines are ridiculously inefficient at converting wind energy to electricity compared to the ideal of 100% efficiency. This however is not an argument against markets allocating capital, any more than the failure of wind turbines to reach 100% efficiency is an argument against building wind turbines. The relevant question is “is the market better or worse than an alternative we can actually reach?”

If the U.S., the most laissez faire of the developed nations,

Actually it isn’t. According to the Heritage Institute’s Index of Economic Freedom, it’s about 6th in the world, below Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Ireland and NZ. (If you don’t like the Index of Economic Freedom, please tell me what was your empirical basis is for claiming that the US is the most laissez faire nation).

Economics is a branch of literature, and in nothing is this more true than the production of the bad poetry that economists so fondly call models

Nope. Economic hypotheses have been disproved. For example, the hypothesis that there is a stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation, the hypothesis that planned economies are inherently superior to market economies, the hypothesis that people in risky situations make decisions according to expected utility theory (albeit this is a microeconomic theory). In literature you don’t get novels or poems being disproved.

Now macroeconomics is a hard science to make any real progress in. For example, just because there is no stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation doesn’t tell us that there isn’t an unstable trade-off, so people can build models in which there is a trade-off and then argue that the world is currently in a situation where that model applies. And just because some planned economies turned out to be worse than some market economies doesn’t tell us that every single planned economy is inferior to all market economies – you can design a new theoretical planned economy and then argue that this is better. And in macroeconomics it is impossible to do experiments, and we struggle to even measure some aspects of the whole economy (eg see the normal criticisms of GDP?). So there is lots of space particularly in macroeconomics for personal biases to cause problems. But it’s still a science, which means we can hope for a better quality of policy advice than that which consists of making up stories that we like to support policies that we want to do anyway.

This is obviously a huge and complex topic and I will return to it (requests begging me not to will be ignored).

However, looking at the Dissent piece, it has the flaws of most of the ‘pro-war’ or ‘Decent’ left: i.e. it is hopelessly Eurocentric and simply ignores the facts of imperialism and colonialism. For example.

‘It (i.e. Capitalism) emerged stronger than ever from a long depression in the 1870s and 1880s, and then revolutions in transportation and communication led to a wave of globalization sweeping over not just Europe but the world at large. Several advanced bourgeois states, meanwhile, had started to enact important economic, social, and political reforms, and, for most of the public, life was actually getting not worse but better (however slowly and fitfully).’ (emphasis added).

I’m sure the Indian and African and Chinese ‘publics’ would be surprised to hear that life got ‘better’ in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s.

Reading through the rest of the piece the same myopia applies. Literally everyone quoted and discussed is either European or American (and almost all of them are white and male). It’s as if Chinese, Japanese, African, Indian and South American intellectuals simply don’t exist, or that if they do, they could contribute nothing to ‘our’ political debate.

Again the examples used invariably European or American. It’s not that the socio-political set up of Denmark or Sweden don’t have anything to teach us: they do. It’s also not as if Swedish society and Danish society are not in many ways superior to British and American (and Australian) society: they are, and this holds for the Scandanavian and Nordic countries generally. However the idea that social democracy exists at present only in Europe is ridiculous.

I mean take this sentence:

‘Despite current disillusionment with capitalism, this is precisely the situation the left finds itself in today, given the loss of its vision of a postcapitalist society. Many of its parties win elections, but few inspire much hope or offer more than a kinder, gentler version of a generic centrist platform.’ (emphasis added).

But to talk about the condition of the ‘left’ and simply to ignore what has happened in South America in recent years is farcical. In Venezuela, Bolivia, and numerous other countries in South America (and Central America, increasingly) more or less ‘radical’ socialist/Marxist political parties have come to power democratically, as Marx always thought might happen, and this red tide is strengthening, not weakening. Or what about Nepal? Or Cyprus? Or Kerala? Whatever one might think of the political situation in these places, the governing parties are hardly ‘centrist’.

It should be added that even in the United States things aren’t as clear as they might seem. We are still in a period of decolonisation. Eventually (and we may have to wait decades but it will happen) the American Empire will have to fall or radically restructure itself because Empires, in the modern world, are simply unsustainable, morally, politically, and, most importantly, economically. It’s not at all clear how ordinary Americans will react to this state of affairs, but a turn to the Left seems at least plausible.

Soilid: There is nothing socialist about having a government that serves the people – we live in a democracy, not a socialist state.

Judging from the rest of your post, we see eye to eye, except terminologically. I’d say that the definition of “socialism” is something like: “a society in which the government serves — ie, is accountable to and controlled by — the people, to a far greater extent than is possible given drastic economic inequality.” In other words, socialism is just radical democracy, applied to economic life as well as political.

LF: I lived through the aftermath of eastern European socialism.

Actually, I was trying to say that what you lived through the aftermath of wasn’t socialism at all. The original socialists — Marx, Morris, Bellamy, Luxemburg, Debs — were radical democrats, whose idea of socialism was to give more substance to political democracy and then extend it to the economy. The Bolsheviks and their successors in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, etc. were frauds, who appropriated the prestige of the term “socialism” to rationalize their party dictatorship. Of course their capitalist opponents were happy to call them “socialists,” too, either from ignorance or in order to discredit the socialist ideal.

Healthcare that’s designed to optimize economic health of the system rather than your own health

Please come to the US and tell us WTF it is that our health-care system is optimized for. We’re genuinely curious about that.

I suggest that you vet your whines more carefully before releasing them to the public. Plausibility is important, and onee bad whine ruins the whole barrel.

Well, I do own a car, and if I had to pay twice as much, I probably wouldn’t, nor would many other people, and the relative appeal of public transport would be much greater, and my, and their, quality of life would be considerably better in that respect. Of course if I were the only one having to pay double for a car, that would be a pain, which is the silly sleight of hand on which the argument depends.

I have said elsewhere and will repeat, if you don’t have a left, the middle becomes the left and the new middle is right-center at best. Ever since WWII liberals have been doing what they could to destroy the American left, and they have been successful indeed, except for a tiny blip 1965-1975. So now the average American thinks that Schumer is an extreme leftist and many think that he’s a Communist.

Social Democrats / Democratic Socialists really need a hard left to scare people with. Maybe if the economy collapses entirely, they’ll get one. Until then, Social Democrats are horrible, unspeakable Communists in American eyes.

Hey LF, what about adding an analysis of Australian or Japanese social democracy to your rant? There’s more to this kind of discussion than contrasting the US and Sweden.

Please come to the US and tell us WTF it is that our health-care system is optimized for. We’re genuinely curious about that.

Was it not until recently optimised for the maximum profitability of the insurance market, in part so that pension funds had a reliable market in which to invest, so that they could deliver on their policies? (obviously also in part so that insurance company directors could get rich at the expense of the people they were denying health care.)

Now of course, not so much, and given that it was always pessimised(?) for delivering a healthy population, there should be a tremendous opportunity for BHO and his buddies to point out that since it no longer does the one thing it was good for well, it might be a good time to look at some assumptions again.

We shall see.

Tracy W., I was discussing the U.S. over the long run, and I’m not sure if the Heritage poll is over the long run or a yearly comparison. I know Australia used to be much more socialistic than the U.S., and then it went in the other direction.
However, this doesn’t really make too much of a difference to the point, which is that the United States is among the most laissez faire of developed nations. In fact, laissez faire nations like Ireland are not going to look very laissez faire next year, unless the Heritage Foundation overlooks the financial sector entirely.

I think G.K at 35 is right – the lineage of social democracy in the U.S runs through the union movement, as opposed to social democratic political parties. Hence, the Reuthers, Sidney Hillman, even John L. Lewis (instrumentally, as a union leader), A.P Randolph, and many if not most of the CIO’s activists and leadership in the 1930s (those who weren’t out-and-out C.P members, although arguably the C.P of the Popular Front era was social-democratic in rhetoric). They tended to follow similar pathways: they generally were in the orbit of the Socialist Party in the early 30s, they either joined or were allies of the C.P during the big organizing drives of 1935-1937, they broke with the C.P over various issues (the Hitler-Stalin Pact, leadership struggles over “front” organizations, domestic politics, etc.), and they then became the left-most edge of the Democratic Party.

What makes this confusing is that a lot of left liberals in the U.S were social democrats in all but name (and perhaps a less developed sense of class politics) – John Kenneth Galbraith, the Keyserlings, Paul Douglas, and a lot of the other surviving New Dealers who continued in politics through the 40s-60s. What makes things even more confusing is that a lot of social democrats became liberals out of survival when the Cold War took off and anti-communist witch hunts made being a social anything the political kiss of death.

Interestingly, one of the things that ties the union figures together is that they tended to come out of industrial unions in industries that were dysfunctional in some fashion – the extreme seasonal swings of the auto industry, the fragmentation and cut-throat competition of the textile and garment industries, and so on. Workers in more stable industries had the luxury of focusing entirely upon the labor vs. capital struggle, but these leaders had to turn to the state out of both ideology and necessity.
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In regards to the article, am I the only one who sees a contradiction in Berman’s argument. On the one hand, she wants “the left [to] regain its old optimism and historical vision.” On the other, she wants the left to focus on”Helping people adjust to capitalism, rather than engaging in a hopeless and ultimately counterproductive effort to hold it back…managing globalization—promoting economic growth and increased competitiveness even as they ensure high employment and social security…[and]agitating for policies—like reliable, affordable, and portable health care; tax credits or other government support for labor-market retraining; investment in education; and unemployment programs that are both more generous and better incentivized.”

The policy just doesn’t match the politics here. From the list of remedies, the political spirit that links them together is a heavy brand of technocratic pragmatism, making the best of the situation as it is. But there is such a thing as politics created by policy – and this kind of policy isn’t conducive to optimism and historical vision. Indeed, these policies aren’t new; they’re more or less what the mainstream of European social democracy and the U.S Democratic Party have been pushing for almost 15 years now. Arguably, one of the reasons why the left has been in such shabby shape recently (with the noted exception of the U.S, ironically), is that these policies lack either the size or scope to deal with the problem, and thus do not sufficiently impress a majority of working class voters.

Consider the list. Among the items, universal health care is the only really major systemic reform. Retraining, education, and better unemployment benefits are all small-bore attempts to deal with the major issue of our time – the “new social question” of increasing unemployment, underemployment, and employment insecurity, to say nothing of increasing inequality and economic insecurity. The first two are basically labor supply measures but without any understanding that the labor demand isn’t there in the private sector. The current incarnation of capitalism just isn’t producing enough living wage jobs, and increasing the number of college grads isn’t the answer, especially when the earnings of college grads have become stagnant/declining. Likewise, retraining credits/U.I/”wage insurance” are unlikely to make up for the lost income that should have been coming, given increases in productivity.

Sure, universal basic income is an example. It’s big, bold, something that’s easy to explain – abolish poverty now! Moreover, it deals with a major issue – stagnant/declining incomes and increasing job/wage insecurity.

Another example might be establishing a right to a job, with the government as employer of last resort. Again, the idea is something big, bold, easy to explain, that deals with a central problem with the current economy.

Support for a 100% carbon-free alternative energy economy might be another.

You get the idea.

Yeah, but that’s something I never understood about the “abolition of labor.” At least from my reading of Marx, the idea wasn’t that humans would cease to work for a living; I was always under the impression that Marx thought the emotional desire to create was a basic human drive, // to Smith’s propensity to truck and barter. Rather, the idea would be that everyone would work only at some skilled craft that they derived personal satisfaction from, for say 4 hours a day, and then go off to read Shakespeare and fish in the afternoon.

I guess that’s why I”ve always preferred ELR, because it emphasizes shifting the economy from a private sector “create more useless widgets for people to buy” only model to more of a public sector public-goods model.

Vis-a-vis the New Left and in light of his concrete political activities, Michael Harrington was a social democrat, pure and simple. In theory, however, he was firmly committed to socialism and considered himself, with sufficient reason, a socialist (in short, that means he could not rest content with any of the current versions of the welfare state and believed capitalism could in fact be transcended by a socialist society; incidentally, while he thought such a society would have a place for ‘markets,’ he explained what is troubling about the phrase ‘market socialism’). And he did, in fact and contra Berman, appreciate the virtues of capitalism. Please see, for instance, his last book, written while he was dying of cancer: Socialism: Past and Future (New York: Arcade, 1989). I suspect very few people have actually read this book.