After the Third Way. The Future of Social Democracy in Europe
Olaf Cramme and Patrick Diamond (eds)
IB Tauris| 288pp | £14.99
Does social democracy in Europe have a future? For many on the European left, social democracy has been a term to avoid. When French socialists wanted to attack the reforming Michel Rocard they denounced him as ‘un social démocrate’. The MPs who broke from Labour after it opted to be unelectable with its anti-Europeanism, unilateralism and uncritical pro-trades unionism in the 1980s called themselves the Social Democratic party. Communists and Trotskyists have always denounced social democracy.
But what is it? Leszek Kołakowski defined social democratic politics as ‘an obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions which produce avoidable suffering, oppression, hunger, wars, racial and national hatred, insatiable greed and vindictive envy.’ That is not bad but most democratic parties could sign up to this wish-list.
What is specific to social democracy? Two of our best thinkers, Policy Network’s Olaf Cramme and Patrick Diamond, have produced this first study on social democracy as the European left works out responses to the new landscape of post-crash Europe.
All the contributors are men, all are closer to retirement after active years in the 20th century as policy intellectuals, and most are based in Britain. Andrew Gamble’s discussion of the moral economy is one of the richest contributions. A key graph shows how the share of national income distributed as wages and salaries declined in the last 30 years from around 65 per cent to 55 per cent. This 10 per cent transfer of wealth from earned to rentier income has had huge consequences. The only way workers (including well-paid professionals) could maintain their purchasing power was by going into debt. The only way states could satisfy welfare benefit demand was by going into debt. Social democratic debt-driven politics was brought to a crashing halt in 2008.
So now the task is to create a new materialism to restore the centrality of earned income and to find ways of the state restraining its own spending. No easy task but unlike the 1980s Labour has Policy Network, Progress, the re-energised Fabians, Compass and others to do some serious thinking instead of the indulgent escapism of the left of 30 years ago.
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Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and a former minister for Europe