See under: European Social Democracy, Sorry State of

I subscribe to a combination of “One first-approximation guess is that this had to do with the largely successful efforts by social democrat ‘reformers’ to replace the old anti-capitalist ideas and language with more market-friendly stuff, which succeeded just in time to leave these parties completely unprepared to deal with the demise of actually existing capitalism,” and “all the good activists, leaders, and intellectuals who could have helped decamped to fringe parties and social movements.”

It is worth noting that ‘right’ in the rest of the world does not resemble what counts as ‘right’ in the United States. So it is probably too extreme to suggests that the election of right-wing parties in Europe represents an end to social democracy in Europe, only a shift in how those social democracies are managed. After all, France and Germany have both had conservative Presidents (Chancellors) for a number of years now, but nobody was saying that European social democracy was over, say, yesterday.

If this is the end of capitalism, I still think a lot of people still prefer it to what socialists were selling in Europe for quite some time.

Raising my head out of the ruck and mire of current US politics, I find myself wondering what should succeed “actually existing capitalism” now that it is trying to commit suicide.

More specifically, has anyone written up a description of compelling alternatives? Piecemeal options that don’t lead toward a larger synthesis probably won’t succeed, given the strengths of the zombie interests that will continue to animate the corpse — as visible today in the outcome of the financial crisis.

It seems to me that there are plenty of institutions (in the broad sense) that aren’t committed to the myths of the market, and that are getting stronger, suggesting they’ll be part of whatever new order emerges. But I don’t know of any vision that puts them together and indicates where we’re headed.

In my guts, I feel like something has gone really wrong with European social democracy, and I have a little gland at the top of my spinal column which keeps telling me that it’s probably Anthony Giddens’ fault. But the better natures of my cerebellum keep telling me that I should keep plugging away with the coin toss model and say that maybe it’s just the case that things zigged rather than zagged this time.

But this model is multinomial, isn’t it? And some of the probabilities changed quite a bit from last time because of those pesky extreme rightists. How does a multinomial line zig? It’d be fun and contrarian and stuff to argue it’s just a coin toss, but I think this time around there is a story to tell, particularly the increase of the probability of the 5th group from 0 to [insert arbitrary value]. In some of these states presumably your model in the 2004 elections was a k-level multinomial, with the k-th level (fascist) constrained to p=0, and in this election the constraint was removed.

I think that model is more interesting than a coin toss…

How does a multinomial line zig?

It zigs in n-dimensional space of course, same way as a statistician’s “generalised coin” has an arbitrary number of sides.

[i mean, for a line in 6-dimensional space, obviously]

remember D^2 is Welsh: zwg makes the cut

that’s just because the opposition are a bunch of tossers…

Isn’t part of what happened the simple pendulum effect?

As a fully paid-up member of the Tosser’s League, I’ll subsume the “pendulum effect” to the coin-toss model, simply as an example of regression to the mean.

dsquared – gotcha. Of course, I take him as merely a representative of a type, but looking at his stuff, I already feel an instinctive dislike.

Regarding the pendulum theory, what makes this not work is that center-right governments were in power across most of Europe when the crisis happened – if the pendulum swings, it should have swung against them. It didn’t, and that’s the weird thing.

So, any advice about good books on the modern European Greens?

“awaiting moderation”
shit. I used the s-word.

@StevenAttewell, “all the good activists, leaders, and intellectuals who could have helped decamped to fringe parties and social movements.”

I think there’s something to be said for that. I only know Britain and Germany, but in both, today’s crop of social democratic leadership is hardly impressive: Brown’s cabinet of mediocrities, Muentefering and Steinmeier in Germany…

The theory here in the Netherlands is thatthe voting wass divided along education lines. Higher educated people are pro-Europe, pro-economic liberalization (relatively, at least), and pro-immigration. Lower educated people feel, with good reason, that they carry the loads of those things without clear benefits .

The winners of the election here were either smaller pro-Europe parties aimed at the educated classes, or more populist, anti-Europe parties, like the far right and the hard-core soc1alists.

The social democrats are always vulnerable to divides between their leadership and their much more worker’s class base, who are never completely aligned in their opinions. In this case, that hurt them a lot. The Christian Democrats have always been much more resilient to this, their leadership is less progressive-in-front-of-the-troops, and their base is (relatively) more willing to follow the leadership.

I think it is important to at least note that:

– however much the Greens went forward, the socialists lost more so the balance on the side is not something to be comfortable with, even if you’re Cohn-Bendit

– the christian-democratic win is not a neoliberal win (explicitly liberal parties lost over-all), it rather is a win for the socially corrected free market (which, despite rhetoric, is maybe closest to Obama content), it’s the ‘steady she goes’ ideology

This being said if social democrats particularly have something to say, they have to start saying it or be content to play second fiddle just controlling the continued existence of what successes were achieved in the 20th century.

I think there is something to be said, on independence of citizens to choose their own choices, & I think that that is fundamentally different from the Greens and can only be said pan-European.

Whilst my other comment clears moderation (after suffering mutilation by the server): no, it’s not just coin toss; yes, it is truely pan-European; and; yes, social democracy in Europe has been embedded in the systems and the Christian Democrat winners are not neoliberals calling for the abolishing of these great social institutions (liberals lost the vote). They call for the status quo – steady she goes was their basic message in Flanders (note: probably the UK is different as is also clear from them choosing not to be in the EPP with the Christian Democrats).

In fact the no-change message that won (well, lost less to the extreme right) is quite the same as the change message of Obama, in content at least.

Social democrats need to say something new if they are to continue to be relevant. Freedom for people to make their own choices (ah yes, that was the original message).

@Jed Harrris,

At least in the U.S., the single most important shift leftward in the last 100 years, the New Deal, was precisely a series of piecemeal reforms. A greater synthesis–New Deal liberalism–emerged out of them, but they were not the result of a clear, coherent larger vision (beyond a desire to throw a bunch of things at the wall and see what sticks).

Certainly the 1930s U.S. left had coherent larger visions. And a good case can be made that those coherent visions led to organizational strength which in turn led to an ability to effectively move the Overton window (and the policies of the Roosevelt administration) leftward.

But I sometimes wonder whether we overvalue the power of a coherent larger vision (not that the left couldn’t use one) when thinking about election results. Do voters actually care about such a thing?

Dan Kärreman – interesting, because that’s very different from here in the U.S, where the Greens don’t even run much on the environment. However, I do wonder what the Green stance on social and economic justice is. BTW, any books to recommend?

Ben Alpers – I would say that the New Deal was a coalition of progressive and liberal ideologies that eventually synthesized; a lot of recent historical research has well established that the New Deal’s experimental programs had an intellectual and political backstory that was ideological in nature. The farm program was very much an outgrowth of Bryanite prairie populism, the relief and jobs program came out of the world of progressive social workers in New York, Social Security basically came out of the John Commons school of progressive economics and the Wisconsin LaFollette tradition, and so on.

That being said, at least what I’m calling for is less a new ideology (although that will be needed eventually) as a new program that really addresses the key issues of economic insecurity and globalization. If they can get a winning platform/argument, the ideological work follows along with it.

StevenAttewell — You’re entirely correct that individual New Deal programs had rich ideological backstories. But no single coherent ideology guided them all–or even accounted for a majority of them. And FDR’s own approach to reform was not particularly ideological.

All of which is not to say that ideological coherence is bad, merely that it is not a necessary precondition for building a successful, reform-minded electoral coalition. I think we’re substantially in agreement about what is necessary: “a program that really addresses the key issues of economic insecurity and globalization.”

The continuing popularity of Berlusconi and his friends continues to baffle all of us non-Italians.

An awful lot of it’s simple populism – a lot of Italians just don’t want to be bothered with those greedy bastard politicians with their elaborate arguments and their stupid social consciences, who the hell do they think they are anyway, let’s have someone talking a bit of common sense and speaking out for ordinary people… And cue Silvio, and don’t bother changing the channel because he’s on the other ones too.

But the Italian Left is actually rejoicing over the Euro results and claiming to have resisted the general drift to the Right – and with a bit of justification. Berlusconi announced beforehand that the results were going to be a massive vote of confidence in his party, which would get at least 40% or maybe 45% (as opposed to 37% at last year’s election), & the death-knell for the Partito Democratico, which would get 20% at most (as against 33% in 2008). In the event Berlusconi slipped back to 35% and the PD got 26% – a lousy result for the Left by most standards, but a resounding victory from the point of view of undermining Berlusconi’s personal credibility.

Incidentally, the far Left also improved on 2008 – last year they ran as a single coalition and lost half their voters to the PD, finishing up with less than 4% of the vote and hence no seats in Parliament. This time they ran as two separate coalitions totalling nearly 7% between them; the bad news is that each of the two finished up with less than 4% of the vote and hence no seats in the European Parliament. It reminds me of Peter Cook’s answer when he was asked if he’d learnt from his mistakes – “Yes, and I’m confident I could repeat them perfectly.”

StevenAttewell – I don’t know how the Greens deal with words like “working class”. There may be some conflict there between coal mining and other such traditional working class occupations and their environmental stance, they plan apparently to get around this by getting everyone green jobs. They are in favour of unions, and anti-discrimination laws, and so forth. As far as I can tell their political philosophy is that if the government just passes enough laws everything will work out fine. Except when it comes to marijuna.

In Europe, the problem appears to be total existential angst among the left and social democrats, with nothing to identify themselves, apart from some vague panic about “fascists”. Two English BNP members of the EU, a Kristallnacht does not make.

But even in Australia, the Labor government has shifted even further to the right than the Howard government with shameless union bashing and promising of more.

Tracy W: I don’t know how the Greens deal with words like “working class”. There may be some conflict there between coal mining and other such traditional working class occupations and their environmental stance, they plan apparently to get around this by getting everyone green jobs. They are in favour of unions, and anti-discrimination laws, and so forth. As far as I can tell their political philosophy is that if the government just passes enough laws everything will work out fine

But working class is arguably becoming an unuseful term anyway. Tons of arguably working class people are white collar, management, yeah even unto board level. Plenty of blue collars are petty-bourgeois. There are ‘self-employed’ wage/commission slaves. The poorest are in many cases long-term unemployed or imprisoned. And in any case certainly ‘working class’ is not a great headline as far as electoral appeal goes.

If useful industries are to be got rid of because ungreen, it seems entirely reasonable and natural that those involved in them can and should be employed in the green alternative that replaces them. There’s nothing fishy or ad hoc or unachievable about that. And on political/economic philosophy, the Green manifesto includes, for just one example, not just a basic income guarantee, but a (non-means-tested) universal basic income. You think they haven’t got some (proper, welfare) economists on board?

I think the left – and possibly radical (utopian) Libertarians – should be getting behind (and in) the Green Party, as it is without doubt the best extant vehicle for radical and left ideas, with a broad and general appeal. Have a look at their manifesto documents. I’ve only just started to do so recently and I am quite impressed. It might take a generation or two to get anywhere (and those ideas may well be compromised/sabotaged), but still…

An ecological society will be made up of self-governing communities of a variety of sizes which will regulate their own social and economic activities. Nothing should be decided at a higher level if it can be decided at a lower one. But the Green Party accepts that regional and national governments will continue to have an important role…

The Green Party does not believe there is an automatic moral obligation on all people to obey their governments. It seeks to maximise the extent to which obedience to laws is based on consent and minimise the need for conformity through deterrence. We believe there are occasions when individuals and groups in society may openly, and peacefully, protest at an unjust law or practice through civil disobedience…

We reject the view that wealth can be measured solely in monetary units, a view which allows its adherents to think it consists primarily of the results of human labour. This error has caused successive governments to pursue objectives which appear to increase the nation’s wealth while in fact they reduce it. Symbols of wealth, like money, reinforce the error and dominate political decision making. Economic growth is a poor guide to human welfare.

If useful industries are to be got rid of because ungreen, it seems entirely reasonable and natural that those involved in them can and should be employed in the green alternative that replaces them.

On the one hand, yes, obviously, the lump of labour fallacy is a fallacy. On the other hand, I’ve seen massive protests by working class men over the shutting-down of mines, car factories, old fossil-fuelled power stations so I don’t think that it’s an entirely reasonable and natural argument to those people involved in the sector. And the skills involved can be quite different – there’s a reason that you can specialise in mine engineering. So I see possible political conflict there.

You think they haven’t got some (proper, welfare) economists on board? …An ecological society will be made up of self-governing communities of a variety of sizes which will regulate their own social and economic activities. (I know I’m mingling Tim’s own words with quoted material).

No mention in here of how these communities will regulate their own social and economic activities. For example, what happens if a member of a community decides to change their religious affiliation? Does the community have a right to demand that every member attend church? Or does a community have a right to stop members from attending church even if those members want to?

And how would economic activities be regulated, given the interlinked nature of economies? For example, say that my community decides that it wants to build a sewage treatment plant. I don’t actually know anything about how sewage treatment plants are built, but lets say they require metal components of a quality not found locally for that community. So how does the community get those materials? Or say a self-governing community wants to build employment by opening a large-scale mass-production solar cell manufactury and selling the product to other communities. What happens if the other communities don’t want to buy the solar cells? I don’t see how a community can regulate its own economic activities when economic activities are so interconnected.

If I invest in some project within a community can I withdraw my money and put it into another community? If so, under what circumstances?

How will tax laws apply across communities?

If a community pays for the education of its young people, does it have any rights to control what they do as adults? (Eg complaints by poor countries about their nurses being lured away by richer countries).

I haven’t run across a political party that does address such detail in their proposals, but I’ve never seen any sign that the Greens have thought seriously about what their principles here mean. Which makes me skeptical as to the quality of the economic advice the Greens are getting.

Nothing should be decided at a higher level if it can be decided at a lower one.

A lot of things can be decided at a lower level, without it necessarily being a good thing that they be decided at a lower level. Take the case of water rights – is it not possible that a local community would seek to use all the water in a big river basin and leave downstream communities dry?

And of course even in less extreme situations often there are arguments on the one hand for deciding at a local level, and on the other hand for deciding at a national level. Take publicly-funded healthcare – now local communities can make decisions about how to spend tax money on healthcare, but this means that you typically get discreprencies between areas as different areas make different decisions, and often have administrators of differing quality, which in the UK has drawn criticism as a “postcode lottery”. I don’t know of any knock-out argument as to whether public health-care spending should be local or national, the Green principle here implies that in the absence of such a knock-out argument it should be local, but have they really thought that through?

We reject the view that wealth can be measured solely in monetary units, a view which allows its adherents to think it consists primarily of the results of human labour.

And a view shared by no one I have ever met. And I have met people who are so free-market as to make me look like a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. (Admittedly attacking strawmen has appeal all over the political spectrum).

StevenAttewell – who were the “New Liberals” and were they around at the beginning of the 20th century or at the end of the 20th century?

In general, just saying I think there are possibilities in the Greens and they aren’t quite as hand-wavy or single-issue as some (inlcuding for quite a while me) thought. Reading theor manfesto docs, I find it quite interesting to see how familiar issues can look when expressed from a standpoint of environmentalism (admittedly it sometimes looks a bit strained!)

Tracy/Steve: I quite agree about the oppressiveness of small communities, esp isolated ones, and I’ve often argued in favour of the freedom of anonymity. But the human rights stuff + the fact that they say national ad regional govts still have a role suggest that needn’t be a problem. And ‘don’t decide centrally where you can decide locally’ depends on the word ‘can’ which will always be implicitly qualified and thus will bear a wide range of sensible interpretations.

In any case, one has to assume that all this stuff would end up being substantially watered down well before it got near implementation…

Also, Tracy: “We reject the view that wealth can be measured solely in monetary units, a view which allows its adherents to think it consists primarily of the results of human labour.”

Regarding the first half, the whole of the economic side of the governement basically works on that basis, and most of economics treats it as the default view (with welfare economics a specialist area). Maybe an exaggeration – I dunno?

I’m not sure about the second bit admittedly, but replace ‘labour’ with ‘human activity’ (to include the “enterpreneurial” role), and maybe it’s a bit more plausible as a description of a widespread tendency to disregard the dubious origins and the long-term value of raw materials, as well as ignoring intangibles in assessing wealth.

Mostly, it’s a focus that differs from the class/redistribution approach (which I’m basically happy with really), and thus to some extent fends off the usual ‘politics of envy’, ‘why level down’ canards that look like beig effective against the latter for the foreseeable future. I dunno, but I think it’s a possibility. How much it will appeal to the less educated, rich and well-informed sector is as suggested a signifcant issue, but I don;t think an alliance with what’s left of the Old left would necessarily be that difficult to achieve, and as for those not of the Old Left, what are they voting for at the moment? Also think it’s a long game, and we should be looking at how the under 25s are thinking at thet moment.

Very civilised thread you have going here.

Tim:

A very informative post. I have to remind myself from time to time not to reflexively counter-attack against decentralizers when the states rights rubbish isn’t present.

Re: the poor/working class, I think a commitment to full employment is an important part of making the transition, as is perhaps playing up the anti-corporate, pro-people side. One of the successes of the environmental movement in the U.S – not the Green Party, and it’s still only to a limited extent – is coining the term “environmental racism” as a way to bridge the racial gap and talk to communities of color about the way that environmental hazards keep getting dumped in poor communities of color, and actually talk about distribution of wealth and power in society that way. Something like that, but for class, might be a good idea.

Jock Bowden – Guh? You’ve blown my mind here. I think I need some more explanation, but are you saying that class isn’t real? Or that class is structure or narrative/discrouse?

Steven

Oh god no. I am definitely a materialist, and quasi-structuralist. I definitely think economic class is real and an extremely active agent of history, and always have. That is my point. Over the past generation that perspective has been sidelined to the privilege of “post/anti” structuralist perspectives – discourse theory, the linguistic turn and so on.

Marxism can never be redeemed, but the idea that a lot of people’s lives are restricted by the top of job they have, and how much money they can thus earn, is not a bad analytical starting point in social ‘scientific’ analysis.

I’m merely wondering if it is now time to relax the race/gender petal and once more push ‘class’ to the metal.

Tracy W
I didn’t make it clear that the quotes in my first post were really meant as an answer to the suggestion that the Greens thought everything could be solved by making more laws, which I took to mean that they would be excessively interfering (since legislation is, really, all that parties committed to the rule of law can do, and there isn’t a good way of counting laws)

Every Econ 101 class and Econ 101 textbook I know of covers labour supply..and… whether the income or substitution effect dominates.
It also covers the long list of untrue assumptions on which (neoclassical) microeconomics is based and lots of other stuff that is largely sidelined later (except for drawing the odd ideological pictogram like the Laffer curve). But none of that has much relation to how wealth is assessed. Leisure isn’t included in GDP these days is it?

government statistics departments collect statistics that are not simply a measure of monetary value, eg infant mortality, life expectancy. Why would they get funding to do that if the whole of the economic side of the government worked on the basis that monetary wealth is all?

Not ‘monetary wealth is all’; ‘all wealth is monetary’. But actually the former is kind-of not far off I’d say, so even in that case, I’d suggest the answer in a given case is going to be one of this complementary pair of alternatives:
1. Because not on the economic side, or
2. Because relevant to monetary wealth – e.g. life expectancy is of course important for planning pensions and some of the other economic accounting problems (worked out in terms of marketised commodities with their numeraire) which are causally related to matters of wealth.

all of human history suggests that there will be problems, even if there “needn’t” be a problem
Yes, but that’s an objection to anything you care to mention.
I was saying that the commitment to constitution-like overarching human rights + the existence of national institutions to enforce them means that the Greens have the resources to avoid any given form of oppression from occuring at the level of local government. I’m thinking from a UK perspective where the national legislature is supreme (regardless of treaties btw – until the judges take a new oath). In the US, well, I suppose voting Green at both State and Federal level would be one recommendation, but yes, as Stephen reminds me , the ‘States’ rights’ stuff is a problem (and one which renders your problems about coordination between locales particularly pressing.) Maybe constitutional amendments are called for?(!)

So the Greens are proposing a plan which even their supporters don’t know what it means.
I wouldn’t call myself a supporter, exactly. I just think that…well, what I said. The bit I quoted was vague, certainly, but given that, I know what it means. And that it doesn’t mean, say, ‘never decide anything nationally unless compelled to do so by logic and the laws nature’

If this is “without doubt the best extant vehicle for radical and left ideas” then the mind boggles at how bad the other extant vehicles must be.
Yes, mine is boggling away like a wrong ‘un.

I’m not recommending the Greens’ current manifesto as though it were a detailed and comprehensive legislative programme, still less one that could be carried out abruptly. I’m talking about the party itself as a vehicle for radical left ideas. (Forget Libertarians, that was an ill-advised afterthought based on my own theorising about where a consistent – and acceptable! – Libertarianism ought to end up…)

I suppose one way of looking at it is that environmental concerns draw attention to matters around the area of the ‘initial acquisition’ fudge in the Lockean property-rights model, and thus undermine the materialism that (in practice) depends largely on taking the material substrate as unproblematic. By taking a less materialistic viewpoint, we bring into focus proper human-centric concerns, rather than concentrating only on econometrically convenient pig-iron production figures. (Economist: ‘If economics is to be very widely and simply applied, we must make the following assumptions:(…). But economics is widely and simply applied. So the assumptions are well-made.’)

I’d say that helps with a project I’m interested in myself, which is severing (behavioural) Liberalism/Libertarianism from the conception of property-rights that has historically accompanied it. I guess that’s something that’s informally been done to some extent in US mainstream politics, where Liberal has a rather specialised use. OK that’s enough rambling for now…