Social democracy… December 2, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Culture, The Left.trackback
Thanks to EamonnCork for providing a link to Tony Judt’s piece in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. Under the title “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy” it’s a fantastic over-view, not merely because it prompts a re-evaluation of basic concepts shared between social democrats and other leftists, but also because it pushes through the tissue thin defenses of ‘economic efficiency’:
For the last thirty years, in much of the English-speaking world (though less so in continental Europe and elsewhere), when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste.
…and beyond that the nostrums of the right…
So much for the theory. The practice is very different. What we have been watching these past decades is the steady shifting of public responsibility onto the private sector to no discernible collective advantage. In the first place, privatization is inefficient. Most of the things that governments have seen fit to pass into the private sector were operating at a loss: whether they were railway companies, coal mines, postal services, or energy utilities, they cost more to provide and maintain than they could ever hope to attract in revenue.
…and beyond that a memory of why we must fight to preserve notions of universal benefit as distinct from targeted benefits…
Let me offer an example. It is cheaper to provide benevolent handouts to the poor than to guarantee them a full range of social services as of right. By “benevolent” I mean faith-based charity, private or independent initiative, income-dependent assistance in the form of food stamps, housing grants, clothing subsidies, and so on. But it is notoriously humiliating to be on the receiving end of that kind of assistance. The “means test” applied by the British authorities to victims of the 1930s depression is still recalled with distaste and even anger by an older generation.[5]
Conversely, it is not humiliating to be on the receiving end of a right. If you are entitled to unemployment payments, pension, disability, municipal housing, or any other publicly furnished assistance as of right—without anyone investigating to determine whether you have sunk low enough to “deserve” help—then you will not be embarrassed to accept it. However, such universal rights and entitlements are expensive.
But what if we treated humiliation itself as a cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to “quantify” the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens before receiving the mere necessities of life? In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. Such an exercise is inherently contentious: How do we quantify “humiliation”? What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society? Unclear. But unless we ask such questions, how can we hope to devise answers?[6]
That’s a crucial point. There’s far too much of the Nick Cohen like musing that we’ve reached the end of what societies reshaped in part or whole by social democracy but now faltering under a renascent economic conservatism can do. Cohen recently asked could any of us envisage free societies much further leftwards from those we have today? Which is to say that he thought they weren’t possible. My belief is that a narrowly social democratic, and more broadly leftist, approach is the least we can achieve. And we keep trying.
And there’s more… I’d be interested in what people think of this. Again, thanks to EC.
“How do we quantify “humiliation”?”
We can’t – although clearly the author wants to try. It’s not a good argument, although a creative one.
A “right” is something inherently not translatable into cash terms. The right to freedom of expression, freedom of association etc., but when I have a right to, say, a free house, someone else has the obligation to pay for it, thus affecting their rights. There’s marked difference between having a ‘right’ to something and having the right to have someone else pay for it.
Having said that, our society has created a bare minimum of poverty etc that we are prepared to tolerate before we give from the collected pool of resources – this does not translate into creating a wealth sharing situation just so a few people don’t (hypothetically) feel “humiliated”. I read recently how in the 1950s many African American families had to be cajoled into accepting food stamps by a state which criticised them for their “pride”.
In any case, most state handouts are still means-tested!
The reference is: US dept of Agriculture magazine, 1972. so, 1970s, not 50s.
Well, I think you’d find a range of opinion that would be at the best dubious about your contention that rights don’t exist because ‘someone else has to pay for it’. Freedom of expression depends on free presses. But you and I will still whether we buy a newspaper or not or watch television or not benefit.. (in fact the US situation on just that point is fascinating with some pushing the US govt to fund print media in order to ensure a plurality of opinion).And you your self accept that as it stands we do believe in collective and economic rights, even many on the centre right precisely because it is recognised that societies require levels of social provision to retain coherence and stability even if we put issues such as a common humanity or decency to one side.
And in that humiliation is significant. You yourself reference African Americans who felt humiliated by the processes within which they engaged with the state. Surely that proves that aspect of the point made above by Judt.
Point taken, although I still think my right to expression doesn’t come at someone else’s cost, (except those who have to listen to me lol) where my right to, say, free bus travel does.
The argument Judt is making above is that state-funded, rights-based welfare is better than relying on private charity because it is less humiliating for recipients and he makes a good point.
However, I wanted to suggest that that ‘humiliation’ may be both fictional (presumably the author has never been on welfare in the US, so his is a middle-class view of welfare) and not necessarily less so when receiving welfare is a ‘right’ – as in the case of the African Americans whose pride was turned into welfare-dependancy by the state.
As you argue, there are other ways to think about welfare than one based on ‘rights’.
I think everything comes at someones cost but I think that’s the price we pay for living in societies.
That someone doesn’t have personal experience of something doesn’t make it ‘fictional’ surely? I don’t know if you’ve been on welfare but I wouldn’t say that disallowed you from having an opinion… but having been on welfare I know personally (for all the good that does in persuading you
) that for some it is a profoundly humiliating experience and that for many who through luck or circumstance have never had to resort to it there’s a dynamic of disdain towards those who do. Never bothered me.
No, I just think that someone who hasn’t been unemployed might think they have an idea of what it’s like, but it’s hard to mentally put yourself in that position.
and, yes, I have been, on three occasions since 1994, but never for more than four months at a time. It was humiliating (but to bolster my point, that may have been the middle-class education talking) but I was aware that there are those who feel no shame in it. It was my ‘entitlement’ but I wasn’t happy about it, and didn’t claim additional supplements like rent allowance.
But the humiliation stemmed more from the feeling of social-uselessness, rather than the impression of ‘stealing’ other people’s taxes. That humiliation motivated me to look harder for work…
And today? a great number of my friends in Ireland are unemployed, many trying to pay mortgages on houses now worth half what they were. Welfare will help them a lot less than an overhaul of the system…
Tim, there is a substantial body of human rights literature that analyses the question of costs. At the time two of the key global human rights instruments were being prepared, the set of human rights were divided into two: the civil and political rights, and the economic, social and cultural rights. The titles of the two instruments reflect that: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The fact that there are two Covenants reflects the Cold War ideologies, and is now accepted by many — though not all — human rights experts not to reflect inherent or fundamental differences in the natures of the rights in the two sets.
On the matter of costs and somebody having to pay as a possible difference, it is not true that this is not a characteristic of CP rights: your right to vote depends on the State spending money running an election, and the democratic representation following votes also typically incurs costs. To take your own example, your right to free speech being meaningful and not an empty paper right requires in part the funding of a courts system (and possibly a police force in severe situation) to ensure that if somebody does try to silence you, your right is not stripped of any meaning.
That isn’t to say that some scholars disagree on whether there is a fundamental difference between the two sets of rights. But two points on that do hold up: one is that the issue of costs is no longer accepted as being the basis for any difference; the second is that human rights scholars are increasingly of the view that there is no underlying difference between them two sets as rights other than the historical accident of what the USA and USSR wanted included in an International Covenant in the 1950s and 1960s.
A huge amount to think about in Judt’s article – I’ll just pick out one point. Many times, he refers to the last three decades as the time span in which reductive economic thinking has replaced the question of ‘public good’, in the making of political policy.
I sometimes think I can guess from a contribution to this site the age of the contributor. Not because of any callowness of language or thought, but because certain writers seem to be constrained – handicapped almost – by an assumption that whatever they advocate must be based on an assumption of the common good, and even have an element of altruism or self-sacrifice about it. Others -younger in my imagination – have a reflexive pragmatism: idealism is all very well, but what works?
The difference, I think, is in the cultural air that the different generations have breathed. Those who came to adulthood since the business schools became so important, since trades unionism lost its grip in the private sector, since media ownership became so concentrated in the hands of a few businessmen, think differently. I think in particular of the assumption that, whatever we do, the ‘markets’ must be placated. You can see it in the different demeanour of, say, Richard Bruton and Leo Varadkar: as if Bruton has chosen his policies after considering the options – but for Varadkar there are no options.
It’s no wonder more than one contributor here described explaining about picketing to younger colleagues last week. Or that someone could state blithely on another thread that there is no pro-business consensus in the Irish media. Perhaps they don’t remember the sixties and seventies- or maybe I’m a dinosaur.
someone could state blithely on another thread that there is no pro-business consensus in the Irish media. Perhaps they don’t remember the sixties and seventies- or maybe I’m a dinosaur.
Since when does denying an anti-union/anti-public sector media bias exists, equate to a denying a ‘pro-business’ one?
In any case I can remember all the way back to decimalisation, and a bit further if pressed, maybe some people just recognise the limits of ideology when confronted with unfortunate contexts. The meaningful social solidarity and common good may well reside, not in fighting PS salary cuts, but in conceding their necessity to continue what social contracts are most needed – and no recourse to businesschool bogiemen.
Fuck off
[edit: moved this from further down the list of comments] Keep it cool David Begging… No need for that.
Crocodile. I had a chat with someone last week who is friends with a mutual acquaintance, a journalist, who when the latter expressed his support for the strike amongst his closest colleagues was literally verbally attacked by them. They saw the strike and the public sector in terms that shocked both of my aquaintances both of whom would be on the left, but more moderate shores of the left. The attacks were pure boilerplate taken from the right. These were people in their 30s. And I find that instructive.
Two thirtysomething journalists didn’t buy into the rationale of last weeks strike and dared disagree with a third?! Very instructive indeed. You’d think they have got the memo about the unarguable merit and justification for the strike.
Just to clarify this, Croc, the journalist acquaintance was in an office with a significant number of other journalists. All of whom disagreed. Aggressively.
Yes, WbyS, you’ve expended a fair few words on this site in trying to explain how a failure of capitalism has turned, in Ireland anyway, into a series of triumphs for the right. The best explanation I can come up with, I’m afraid (sorry, Alastair) is the blanket support for the economic right in our media. They’ve managed to make the ‘social fabric’ ,which some of us still value, into some kind of luxury which can only be afforded in good times, to portray public service workers as complicit in the bust, and to prescribe a cuts programme so unremittingly that it seems, to the man in the street, inevitable.
Sonofstan is correst in comment 3 when he points out that we never really had the social democratic mindset that, for example, still makes Britons value their NHS. Lenihan told the truth when he said there would have been riots in France if someone had tried to bring in the ‘pensions levy’, because France’s political centre-of-gravity was far enough left, for long enough, to make such cuts unthinkable.
What’s remarkable to me Crocodile is that positions that in other European polities are seen as clearly some way right of centre here are shrugged off and even dressed up in quite different clothing. I think of Colm McCarthy arguing that he wasn’t seeking to dismantle the welfare state. Well, two thoughts strike me there… there was never much of one to begin with and secondly given the scale of cuts that he himself champions such significant tranches of social provision will be removed (and here I applaud Pat McArdle who I’ve given a hard time rhetorically over his stuff for his essential honesty in saying what the scale of this ‘adjustment’ will be) that the impoverished place we were in originally will be pushed to a profoundly weakened and parlous state. I think that points to a huge deficit in understanding of political theory, and indeed political economy. I’ve more thoughts on that but I’m trying to work them into a more coherent form.
Infamy! Infamy! – They’ve (the meeja) all got it infamy!
Casual interaction with a random group of 30/40 somethings in my circle – both within and outside the public sector (and my private sector circle would be rather more NGO-biased than Business school-biased) – involving no awful verbal aggression, suggests that precious few thought that there was much merit in the strike – or expected that there was much hope of hanging onto current pay deals.
It was social democracy that bound the middle classes to liberal institutions in the wake of World War II (I use “middle class” here in the European sense). They received in many cases the same welfare assistance and services as the poor: free education, cheap or free medical treatment, public pensions, and the like. In consequence, the European middle class found itself by the 1960s with far greater disposable incomes than ever before, with so many of life’s necessities prepaid in tax. And thus the very class that had been so exposed to fear and insecurity in the interwar years was now tightly woven into the postwar democratic consensus.
It strikes that this didn’t really happen in Ireland, which is why the ‘closer to Boston than Berlin’ nostrum was so effective. The welfare state, such as it was here, was ‘just’ for the poor, and people bought out of it as soon as they could. The ‘just for the poor’ model also tied in nicely with the the church’s preference that such things be seen as altruism towards the less well off from the ‘comfortable’ rather than any kind of right.
Conor McCabe made a very similar point recently. That we’ve never really lived through a social democratic moment in this state. It’s all been partial… It’s like Tim saying it’s mostly means tested. Well it is and it isn’t. Child benefit being one good example, state pensions being another – in part.
I think your point about religion is very important. That gave the character to much social provision and the sense that entitlement was far from a good thing. It’s always intriguing to me how perceptions of class shape behaviour in ways that cut directly across self-interest.
Yeah, I was thinking of Conor’s point and should have credited it. This may also tie in with some of the debate on the ‘hypothetical’ Unionist Socialist – its easy to forget, now that our benefits are ‘among the most generous in Europe’, but there was a time when Britain was clearly way ahead in terms of equality of social provision, healthcare and educational opportunity – the gap didn’t begin to close until the late ’80s. So, for someone of a leftist viewpoint, from a unionist background, whatever reservations you might have had about the statelet, its easy enough to see how you’d feel more comfortable within a Social Democratic UK than a poor, and desperately unequal Ireland.
Entirely agree SoS. That viewpoint would be logical as well as attractive in that context.
Don’t know if this will go in under SonofStan’s comment but that’s the intention…
And the clincher for that fabled Unionist Socialist was the pervasive church control – of education, they owned and ran the schools; of health, ditto many of the hospitals and other health services. We now know only too well what was done to many people under that ownership. Whereas there was democratic, secular control in Britain.
My wife’s late uncle spent some time in Clonakilty Hospital in the early 90′s. This facility was owned and run by the State through the Southern Health Board. A Protestant neighbour and friend of his was also in the ward. The wife’s uncle used to get a great kick out of the fact that Mass was broadcast daily over the tannoy in the ward – there was literally no escape. In fairness I think the protestant neighbour saw the funny side too. But really it was no laughing matter.
Finally (honestly). When we do establish a socialist utopia on this side of the border our poor fabled unionist socialist still won’t want to jump on board… because he’s British. Aaargh.
It’s a pity Judt and others like him weren’t saying this 30 years ago. And given the immense damage to Social Democracy from within, via the work of trash like Blair, Bettino Craxi and Schroder, it may not be possible to revive the patient.
Also, it’s interesting that while Eric Hobsbawm may exagerrate the Soviet factor as an incentive in pressuring Western capitalism to concede reforms, Judt (on a first reading) doesn’t mention it at all.
Dr. X. Excellent point albeit he’s talking more about where we are than where we’ve been. I’ve little doubt that that dynamic was hugely significant in the development and response of western capitalism. I think Judt though is far from the worst, and reading some of his history he’s taken some pretty brave personal stances…
I’m doing my best on Vincent Browne at the moment, but fuck me that Fionan Sheehan and that Ciaran Mac An Bhard, ye call me a sell-out but look at what passes for informed comment? A pair of wankers who are sneering at the very idea of trade unionism…
I saw Vincent Browne too. Almost a fistfight between David Begg and Sheehan – the political editor of our biggest-selling broadsheet. Sheehan incoherent with anti-union rage; Begg accusing the Indo of harassing him at his private residence; Sheehan claiming that ‘everyone’ in the private sector has taken a pay cut. Begg suggesting that the media has a distorted view of this because its dependence on advertising revenue has meant heavy cuts in the media.
Don’t be expecting any balanced coverage of the strikes that will inevitably follow the budget, in the Indo.
And don’t forget Begg claiming that 70% of the private sector haven’t had any cut in their income. If I can’t expect any balance on this issue from the Indo, I certainly won’t be expecting any from the ICTU either. It’s like these people have lost the faculty of common sense.
The triumph of Thatcherism and Reaganism,-the ‘re-bunking’
of an obsolete ideology,-infected many on the left.
And certainly the media was infested with the neo-liberal nonsense.
The mono-culture of orthodox economics in the universities contributed greatly to this single vision of market fundamentalism.
The current deep crisis of capitalism starkly shows the failure of this intellectual hegemony, and has thrown its adherents into disarray.
Both capitalism and its intellectual underpinning,-orthodox economics-, are revealed as seriously flawed.
Despite (or maybe because of) the adoption of Keynesianism by many centre-right government, a political space has opened which the left has yet to take advantage of.
Alastair,
Is Begg wrong with his 70% figure? and if so, how do you know? not trolling, just asking.
On this point, on the 6.1 news last evening, David Murphy, going through the tax returns, said the drop in income tax was a result of unemployment and ‘probably’ due to wage cuts in the private sector; he offered no figures, no breakdown – it seems to me that some analysis ought to be offered to back it up. He also, in the same report, said that the fall in VAT receipts represented a fall in consumer confidence (that’s a great expression – much better that ‘people have no money’) and the effect of people shopping north of the border. Again, I’m not disputing that this last is a factor, but some quantification would be nice. I object to news reports being offered on an ‘everybody knows’ sort of basis – It’s bad enough from the newspapers.
And on VB, whatever its faults, the existence of a programme where intelligent questions are asked and answered, and the soundbite resisted, deserves at least two cheers at a time such as this. Thought the show they did on the day of the strike last week was exemplary in comparison with RTE on the day.
Is Begg wrong with his 70% figure? and if so, how do you know? not trolling, just asking.
The only source for the 70% figure is the IT poll of 1000 business people. It’s not a figure supported by the recent RedC poll (which may be equally wrong of course) and more persuasively by the CRO income tax figures for the last 3 months, which show a 13% fall from projections over those 3 months. So, taking into account the pension levy, health levy, the live register figures (which haven’t grown significantly in the last 3 months), there’s a 13% fall in income in a quarter of the year – whatever way you spin it, it hardly makes sense that it only stems from 30% of the private sector still in employment.
Thanks.
Its hard to see how any of this will be clear until there’s substantial CSO info.
The pay cut stats can be swung in all sorts of ways.
Is less overtime a pay cut?
Is not getting your bonus a pay cut?
So whilst the basic salary may be the same, there is a dramatic cut in what a worker is actually earning.
I see RTE’s ‘Primetime Investigates’ begins a new series next Monday, two days before the budget. Guess what they’re investigating! Go on! No, not the moving of developers’ and bankers’ assets into their wives’ names, or the flouting of the residence rules by billionaire tax exiles but…..social welfare fraud!
There’s a shock.Justifies everything that nice Mr Lenihan is planning to do, I’d say.
Coming next week – sweet old Charlie on Fair City is murdered by a public servant.
very good. I hear those public service/ welfare scrounging layabouts are also printing super-dollars/ training terrorists in the bekaa valley.
Just to tie everything together.
Actually I dont mind people going after social welfare fraudsters, its just they should have a bit of balance with regard to white collar crime / tax evasion. As me oul father used to say “one lot have nothing and want something, the other lot have everything and want a bit more”.
I’ve been a fan of Judt’s for decades, and was very saddened to hear that last year he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. As of October 2009, he is paralyzed from the neck down. The world is unjust and cruel.
By the way, ‘Reappraisals’, a collection of his recent essays, mostly from New York review of Books, is being remaindered around Dublin shops.
Returning to the point about the middle classes benefitting from the welfare state, this was undoubtedly the case in the UK. There wer certain things in particular that helped them: higher education (at least prior to the introduction of fees and loans versus grants), the NHS, you could include increased state support for “culture”, public transport in certain contexts (London commuter rail services), help for the elderly etc. So yes, these probably ensured the aquiescence of many in the middle class, centre or right inclined, for the welfare state.
Despite receiving such substantial benefits the same people did, and do, whinge about those on welfare benefits. Nevertheless I think the social democratic experience in the UK created a feeling about what the “bottom line” might be in state provision and maybe one of the reasons the Tories lost their support in 1997 was due to the feeling that that bottom line was being breached. Indeed the state of the school system (e.g. fabric of buildings) and the NHS was truly scary. In fairness to NuLabour they did pump a lot of cash into those sectors to imprive them (recent NHS “scandals” notwithstanding).
Alas, NuLabour missed an opportunity for Social Democracy by essentially swalloing much of the Thatcherite ideology, and that has come home to roost. I don’t think they know what they are and waht they want to do now, they may even have lost the lust for power. The alternative is, of course, horrible (Posh Boy Dave).
I’m not sure that Social Democracy is played out but it needs a clearer vision and braver exponents if it is going to stand a chance of recovery. Although, 30 years ago, in the left groupings I was around there was the idea that Labour/Social Democracy was “Reformism without the reforms” and therefore essentially doomed. That was based on the idea that the state of capitalism in the UK in the 70s made social democratic reform impossible, not that they didn’t want to enact reforms. Today they don’t even seem to have the will for it.
Going back to that anecdote about the group of 30-something journalists frothing with rage at the thought of last week’s strike – speaking as someone who is roughly one of their peers (late 20s to be precise), I wouldn’t say they are a representative cross-section of this generation.
The people I came across in college who had aspirations to be journalists fell into 3 groups: ones who were ideologically on the Left, ones who were ideologically on the Right (the second group was a little smaller), and the largest group by a healthy distance, who were simply ambitious and ready to go along with the prevailing orthodoxy if it made it easier for them to advance in the trade. I found it remarkable how well they had themselves trained when they were still undergraduates and wouldn’t even have the prospect of working for a newspaper or broadcaster for several years – they knew all the tricks, automatically giving credence to anything said by an “establishment” source whether or not there was evidence to back it up and so on.
I had a lot more time for the people who were ideologically conservative, you could at least have a debate with them about political ideas whereas the ladder-climbers just didn’t understand the basic concepts – I suppose it’s the difference between someone who can write their own script and someone who has to learn off the lines in advance and repeat them verbatim.
A few of the people I’m thinking of now are already working for conservative, anti-union newspapers (the vast majority in this state, of course) and I’ve seen their by-line beside articles trotting out the usual line about the need to take an axe to the public sector until the blood of those greedy civil servants is flowing in the streets. If the prevailing wisdom was further to the left, I’m sure they’d be trimming their sails in that direction, too.
I’m not sure what the general feeling among the 20- and 30-somethings about trade unionism would be, but you probably wouldn’t get much sense of it from a group of journalists who have aspirations to work for the Indo or the Mail. My impression is that it varies depending on what people are exposed to – my partner was out on strike last week and everyone in her workplace was well behind it, across the age range; people in non-union workplaces who haven’t been in direct contact with the trade union movement would probably be very different.
A side point, but the very fact that most journalists now working in this country came through college, and more specifically journalism/ communication courses is probably one reason, leaving aside the pattern of media ownership in this country, why the media weather is the way it is.
Whereas in a previous generation, journalism was a trade, usually entered by bright, literate boys who couldn’t afford university – or even to finish school – and worked their way up from provincial papers, doing the courts, the local sports and the like, boys who would have generally not been far from manual industrial or agricultural employment in their family, and whose sympathies, even if not leftish by any means, would have not been that of the establishment.
Nowadays, journalism or ‘media’ is a career, learned at one remove in a classroom: and those going into it are more likely to be middle-class (with the usual provisos about what this actually means here)
What there does seem to be, however, is a trend among journalists of a certain age, late ’30s, early ’40s, to re-imagine the era of 1987, ‘Mac the knife’ MacSharry, hospital closures and cutbacks as halcyon days that gave birth to the Celtic Tiger. Some like Sheehan and Coleman, are eminently punchable, so props to our friend who managed not to lose his temper with them last week. I myself believe that ‘when your in it, your in it, and if it’s a lie, then we fight on that lie.’
See y’all.
how many of us watch The Wire? I have wondered if it is 95% or 100%?
I’ve never seen a whole episode of the Wire. I suspect that like Mad Men, it’s so good it ultimately serves to expose the limits of TV as a medium.
But that’s a whole other thread.
thats interesting. It is another thread but I was having a conversation about how it stretches TV as a medium. Time will tell I suppose.
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