Social
democracy is dead
Across Europe, labour parties are reinventing themselves to stay relevant, but they’ve been redundant for decades.by Michael Fitzpatrick
When I was first invited to do this talk, I thought a
more appropriate title for it would have been ‘Did social democracy survive the
twentieth century?’ The answer, I’m afraid, is no.
The other response I had was to go up to my loft and
dig out a very old pamphlet that I wrote in 1978 called Who Needs the Labour Party? It was written in the moment before
the 1979 General Election, in which Margaret Thatcher first came to power. It
was actually published in September 1978 because, as people who remember that
period know, then prime minister James Callaghan was expected to go to the
country six months before he did. His great error was to delay the election;
that delay contributed to his defeat.
But the point of that pamphlet was to call for an
abstention in the election, an abstention from voting Labour, at a time when
voting Labour would have been the traditional response among the constituency
to which it was directed. It was about as popular as campaigning in favour of
female genital mutilation. It’s hard to recollect just how profound that sense
of loyalty, particularly on the left of the Labour Party and in the Labour
constituency, was in that era. Certainly that’s something that has long
disappeared.
The pamphlet came at the end of a turbulent decade
which started around 1968, the annus
mirabilis of the postwar
period, the year when great eruptions took place. It was the end of the postwar
boom, the collapse of consensus politics, the upsurge of trade-union militancy,
radical politics across Europe, feminism, black power, national-liberation
struggles around the world. It was the great upsurge, the return to
significance of the Labour Party in national life after the postwar period when
it had been pretty much marginal. Particularly, this time was about the rise of
the Labour left.
William Wordsworth famously wrote of the period after
the French Revolution, ‘What joy it was in that dawn to be alive, to be young
was very heaven’. And that was what it was like in that decade between 1968 and
1978. It was a very dynamic and creative period, and the predominant sense –
particularly among the young, the radical, the militant wing of the working
class – was of the possibility of transcending capitalism. There was a
widespread conviction that this was indeed possible, that it was possible to
build an alternative social and economic system to the prevailing one. We were
not talking about improving the safer neighbourhood scheme. That was not the
objective of the youthful radicals of that period.
The problem that emerged towards the end of the
Seventies was that the radical impulse had reached a barrier in the form of the
Labour government that had come to power in 1974. It succeeded, through the
mediation of its left wing, in containing that radical upsurge, particularly
the militant wing of the trade unions, and it succeeded, through the form of
the ‘Social Contract’, in making a deal which actually had the effect of
containing wage demands, of winning the first round of cuts in public
expenditure and generally creating considerable demoralisation on the left. The
issue for the left was how to deal with that problem that the Labour Party
manifested: that the party would become a vehicle for the containment of the
radical movement rather than its advance.
One person who personified that problem in that period
and after was Ralph Miliband, a man who has acquired some posthumous celebrity
as the father of New Labour high flyers, Ed and Dave. At that time Ralph
Miliband was well-known as a left-wing figure, an intellectual in the Labour
movement. In 1961 he wrote a famous book called Parliamentary Socialism – Studies
in the Politics of Labour. I notice there’s a lecture, if people are
interested in this, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the book next
month at the London School of Economics, where Miliband was a lecturer.
The point of Parliamentary
Socialism was to draw out the
problem that the Labour Party had become a vehicle for containing the radical
movement and the possibility of the transcendence of capitalism. How could the
left deal with this? Ralph Miliband resigned from the Labour Party in the
mid-Sixties and was part of a whole series of intellectual and organisational
movements over the next 20 years to try construct some sort of alternative to
the Labour Party.
One of the ironies of Miliband’s book is that it was
republished in different forms every few years with a different introduction or
a different foreword or a different afterword, all of which hedged around this
problem of how the left could deal with the Labour Party. In 1976, he famously
wrote that the ‘most crippling of all illusions’ was the idea that the Labour Party
could be transformed into a socialist party. This was an illusion to which
Ralph ended up being a victim. Because what happened in the succession of
episodes through this period was that every time the Labour Party was perceived
as a negative force, as betraying the forward-movement of labour, the attempt
to create an alternative would emerge, and then an election would come along
and the whole thing would be forgotten, which is what happened in the 1978-79
period.
The whole of the left argued that the Labour Party had
all these negative characteristics, but still it was the lesser evil to the
Conservative Party and so everyone should succumb and vote for Labour. That was
what my pamphlet Who Needs the
Labour Party? was a challenge
to. It provoked a very negative response because it posed very directly a
political challenge to Labourism, beyond the challenge of Miliband, in terms of
its understanding of the whole Labour Party but particularly organisationally.
It said, look, what’s really important here is that we need to build an
alternative to the Labour Party rather than endlessly try to exist within it.
The entire rest of the left, and there were different factions and fragments
and movements of the left, all supported the Labour Party in the election.
In retrospect I think we can see that the period after
1968 was the last gasp of that time, when the dominant tension in world
politics was between capital and labour, between the left and the right.
Francis Fukuyama famously argued his thesis that this marked the ‘end of history’.
Obviously it didn’t, but it did mark the end of politics in the old form.
Particularly, it marked the end of the historic role of social democracy
because its very existence was dictated by its relationship between the poles
of capital and labour, between left and right, between the working class and
the capitalist class, in terms of the working out of politics. And when that
polarisation no longer existed then traditional social democracy no longer had
a role and the parties of labour became redundant. A parallel process afflicted
the right. The Conservative Party also disintegrated following this period, but
that’s a separate, although related, story.
So the question is whether social democracy can
survive this sequence of events. The answer is only by fundamentally
reconstituting itself. The model for that of course is New Labour, which is a
model that existed not only in Britain but in the rest of Europe as well. In
other words, by negating its history as a party of the working class or as a
party of the labour movement, as the party which had the goal of socialism, all
these things were abandoned in quite explicit terms.
That movement had a transient success in the context
of the whole Tony Blair phenomenon, and that had a very a short life expectancy
with the instability of the current political world. And so you see all sorts
of new alternatives now proliferating, interestingly colour-coded ones.
So now you’ve got Green Labour, and this is one option
that has emerged in Europe where old parties of labour have gone into coalition
with green parties. We’ve also seen Rainbow Labour, the idea of Labour being a
multicultural party, which was quite successful for a period in London when Ken
Livingstone was mayor of London. In a way, this foreshadowed the politics of
celebrity as an alternative – Livingstone was the Arnold Schwarzenegger of
British politics before Schwarzenegger had become successful in California. And
that, too, has been a busted flush.
Then we have Blue Labour, which is close to my heart
because it is represented by, among others, Baron Glassman of Stoke Newington
and Stamford Hill, which is where my surgery is. So he’s very much regarded as
a local boy. But Blue Labour also has some striking familiarity to me as
someone who was brought up in Sheffield. It’s like the section of the Labour
Party that related to the more conservative sections of the working-class
population in terms of a general communitarian, socially conservative,
anti-immigrant, anti-welfare outlook. There’s a constant reworking of the old
themes out of the old locker.
We’ve also got Purple Labour. I don’t know if people
have noticed Peter Mandelson’s attempt to create a Labour Party which is more
responsive to the needs of the banking and financial sector. I can’t see that
having much success.
There’s even a role for Red Labour and you see this
throughout Europe, with rumps of old Stalinist, Trotskyist, old left, socialist
parties coming together with varying degrees of electoral success. Because such
is the incoherence of the political realm throughout Europe in the recent
period that anybody can launch a campaign – look at the Pirate Parties now on
the rise in Scandinavia and elsewhere, look at the Irish presidential election.
The interesting feature of that is that, basically, anything could have
happened. And that’s the state of the current political firmament. Virtually
anything can happen in the world of politics due to the incoherence and
instability that’s come into it, and so scandals and celebrity involvement and so
on take priority.
Virtually anything can happen, that is, apart from a
return to classical social democracy – that is not a possibility. The historic
role that social democracy played is over. In a sense its heyday was a very
long time ago, between 1890 and the First World War. It’s had a prolonged,
posthumous existence since then, but it really is history.
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