Some time ago I tried to point out that, despite the endless
barbs being hurled in his direction insisting he was barely disguised Marxist,
Trotskyist, Stalinist etc., Jeremy Corbyn was and is a mainstream
social democrat. In fact, much more so than other people who proudly ordain
themselves social democrats.
This wasn’t in order to denigrate him from a far left
perspective. Social democracy, like all political traditions, has flaws but
also distinct characteristics that mark it out from other allegedly
‘progressive’ currents such as liberalism. At this moment in British politics,
the distinctiveness of social democracy needs to be loudly proclaimed. It isn’t
liberalism and if it is drowned in a sickly sea of liberalism, this once-in-a-generation
chance to alter the British political system will be lost.
A century ago
Historically, social democracy emerged in the early 20th
century as way of advancing the interests of the working class through the
Parliamentary system. This was to mark it out from syndicalism – before the
First World War a massive movement – which dismissed the Parliamentary system altogether
and advocated that workers themselves should democratically control industries
and workplaces. This is why the ‘Labour’ party was created – to represent the
interests of labour (i.e. workers) in Parliament.
Social democracy also, in time, broke from orthodox Marxism
in that it sought immediate improvements in workers’ conditions, rather than
waiting for some inevitable collapse of the capitalist system. And it also
repudiated Leninist revolutionary socialism. Social democrats upheld the
Parliamentary, ‘democratic’ system, fought (fitfully) for universal suffrage,
were consciously reformist and rejected ‘democratic centralism’ – the idea that
an authentically Leninist (or Trotskyist) political party should work out an
agreed line and then rigidly enforce it amongst its membership. In theory,
social democratic parties should be democratically run and encourage free and
open debate.
To reiterate, there are
flaws within social democracy. The lack of interest in the fate of the
capitalist system, or how it is changing, means that social democrats rather
blindly assume the state can always be deployed to improve people’s conditions
when those conditions also depend on capitalism functioning well. In the
context of spiralling climate change, the connection between healthy capitalism
and prospering social democracy is a glaring contradiction. Admittedly, social
democrats do sometimes envisage life beyond capitalism, a hazy end point called
‘democratic socialism’ which is always seemingly in the distance and evasive of
exact definition.
Moreover, the commitment to democratic, Parliamentary means
papers over, not just Leninism, but also other forms of democracy as well, such
as syndicalist ‘workers’ control’ and democratic councils, or soviets, the
directly democratic, face-to-face forms of government that, as pointed out by
Hannah Arendt, appear spontaneously in every revolutionary outbreak and aspire
to permanence.
After neoliberalism
However, there are also valuable features in social
democracy which now need to be brought to the fore. One of these is – or should
be – a commitment to class politics and to represent the interests of its
class. Whereas in the 1950s and ’60s this class element meant social democracy
was fundamentally a conservative force, protecting post-war gains, now – in the
aftermath of decades of neoliberalism, privatisation and the privileging of the
power of employers over employees – to
be true to itself, it has to be radical.
One instance is collective bargaining. At their height,
collective bargaining agreements covered over 80% of workers, but now they
apply to just over a fifth of the workforce and less in the private sector. In
that they presuppose negotiations with trade unions, they symbolise a
recognition of the rights and dignity of labour, in contrast to the current
attitude of treating workers like civilians in an occupied country – constantly
under suspicion and surveillance. Plans for a resuscitated Ministry
of Labour – which will spearhead attempts to revive collective bargaining
across the economy – are redolent of Ernest Bevin’s reign as Minister of Labour
in the Second World War coalition when for the first time in British history a
rough, day-to-day industrial democracy prevailed.
This highlights an integral difference between social
democracy and liberalism. Social democrats – in common with liberals – should
be in favour of democratic norms, equality before the law and human rights.
They should be implacably opposed to the ethno-nationalism of Donald Trump or
the hard-right culture warmongering of Boris Johnson. But social democrats have
to be about more than this.
Without practical rights and popular organisations that
mediate between government, powerful institutions and ordinary citizens,
democratic norms are just formal and empty (which isn’t to say they are without
value) and can easily be co-opted by wealthy interests. For example, the
introduction – by
current Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson – of fees of up to £1,200 for
attending employment tribunals is something no social democrat can ever
countenance because it assumes, in time-honoured liberal fashion, that the
formal, theoretical right to justice no different to the practical ability to
access it.
This acknowledgement that the formalities of
liberal-democracy and abstract human rights are insufficient can lead social
democrats into interesting areas. It can lead them to attempt to democratise
the economy and contest the divine right of capital to rule in the ‘private’
sphere of the economy. To be sure this is not inevitable. Historically, there
are numerous occasions when social democrats have been mind-numbingly
unimaginative and cemented the rule of bureaucracies and managers. Famously,
Herbert Morrison (Peter Mandelson’s grandfather coincidentally), as deputy
Prime Minster in the post-war Labour government, insisted that the newly
nationalised industries be run in a top-down bureaucratic fashion – much like
the private companies they superseded – with absolutely no concession, beyond
the rights of trade unions, to the right of workers to have any say in how they
were run.
The other social
democracy
But there is another social democratic tradition – call it
more radical social democracy if you want to – that believes in socialisation, not merely nationalisation and wants to open up both
public and private enterprises to the influence of citizens and workers. This
can be seen in post-war demands from some trade unions that nationalisation
equate to a rough economic democracy, the Institute for Workers’ Control in the
1960s and the 1976 ‘Lucas Plan’, a blueprint to transform a weapons’ company
into a worker-controlled firm, producing for social need.
Internationally, this current in social democracy can be
discerned in the 1976 ‘Meidner Plan’, the Swedish endeavour to create
‘wage-earner funds’ that would accrue a steadily rising proportion of private
company shares, eventually coming to own the firms – and thus most of the
economy – outright. The plan was belatedly introduced in 1984 but in extremely
truncated form (a ‘pathetic
rat’ in the description of its original author, economist Rudolf Meidner).
Now this other social
democratic tradition is plainly where Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell resides.
His Inclusive Ownership Fund (IOF) echoes the Meidner plan, though with the
caveat that a maximum of 10% of company shares can be transferred to the
workforce. The ‘right to own’ proposal, which will give the workforce the right
of first refusal to buy a company if it is sold, dissolved or floated on the
stock exchange, is another example. Services to be nationalised – for example
the Royal Mail, and the rail and water industries – would not be handed over to
civil servants or imported private sector managers to run but would be governed
– in part at least – by workers
and service users.
Erstwhile doubts about the record of social democrats in
government are appropriate here. As the Swedish case above shows (and it is far
from alone), proposals are one thing but the actuality is quite another. Even
Theresa May wanted to place workers on company boards before the idea was quietly
shelved because of opposition from the CBI. France and Germany both insist
on worker representation at board level but the effect is negligible. Moreover,
a criticism of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) in the US – which are akin to McDonnell’s IOF and ‘Right
to Own’ schemes – is that they boost productivity and wages but do not entail
real participation, a classic social democratic fudge regarding the ‘right to
manage’.
If and when a left-wing Labour government is elected, its
plans will immediately rub up against the interests of the ‘big end of town’
(as the City of London was called during the New Labour years). Whether they will then be diluted to ‘pathetic
rat’ status is impossible to say. Britain’s business sector is heavily
financialised and used to – in terms of internal management – entirely getting
its own way. Much will depend on whether the power and reach of trade unions is
transformed. In a classic social democratic country such as Norway a limited
form of industrial democracy – a joint management model which gives workers’
representatives co-determination over company decisions – can apply because
managers and owners accept trade unions as legitimate, in fact essential, parts
of the negotiating landscape. Such acceptance is thoroughly alien to the
mind-set of British business and there will be immense resistance to any change
in the balance of power.
The watershed of
Brexit
Clearly one question social democrats now cannot bypass is
Brexit. The current Labour party position – implacable opposition to no-deal
whilst proposing to negotiate its own deal which it then puts to the country in
a referendum including an option to remain – is, in my opinion, the best
compromise from a bad situation it didn’t create or desire. Many politicians,
including Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Vince
Cable, voted for the referendum and promised to respect its outcome.
However, social democrats, in particular, cannot be agnostic
about the government of the EU. In its core institutions – the Council of the
European Union, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the
European Court of Justice (ECJ) – the EU embodies a liberal philosophy anathema
to social democracy. Deriving most strongly from German ordo-liberalism,
this approach assumes that appointed ‘experts’ and judicial ordinances should
have priority over democratic impulses. Laws are mainly made by the Council of
the European Union (ministers from member states) and interpreted by the ECJ.
It is no accident that classical liberal Friedrich Hayek
advocated a
pan-state single market – many years before its actual creation in Europe –
as a way of protecting the free market from the meddling of democratic
governments. The fact that many European social democrats have tamely accepted
this liberal settlement shows nothing more than the bankruptcy of European
social democracy.
The dilemma for the Labour party is that its ‘soft Brexit’
policy (membership of the customs union, close relationship with the single
market etc.) almost certainly presupposes acceptance of many of the laws and
directives that accompany EU membership. In at least two areas – state aid and
public monopolies which don’t permit outside competition – there will be
conflict with the priorities of a social democratic Labour government. In
whichever of the two states Britain may be in (continuing as an EU member or
the halfway house of Customs Union membership) the only coherent option for a
social democratic government is to welcome the conflict, refuse to give in to
penalties in the form of fines or law suits and attempt to widen the dispute to
other member states. Remain and Rebel as opposed to Remain and Reform.
In Britain at the moment a social democratic Labour party
faces two adversaries. One is the hard-right government of Boris Johnson
committed to job destroying free trade deals, breaking free of the regulations
that irritate entrepreneurs and fermenting a culture war. The other comprises
liberals in each of the three main parties who – peculiarly undisturbed by
years of austerity that have stripped public services to the bone and the
conscious cruelty imposed on benefit claimants and sick and disabled people –
wish that the last three years simply hadn’t happened. The answer is not
reactionary conservatism or status quo liberalism. Social democracy – for all
its flaws – approximates to one. If not now, when?
