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The Library and the Workshop
Social Democracy and Capitalism in the Knowledge Age
By Jenny Andersson Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8047-6263-2
Chapter One
Dilemmas of Social Democracy
The History of Social Democracy
Any history of social democracy is inevitably the history of its context. Social democracy is a political movement umbilically linked to capitalism and modernity, dependent on these forces for its very existence. Just as it once grappled with questions of industrial modernity, it continues to grapple with the issues and dilemmas posed by (post)industrial modernity.
The relationship between social democracy and its surrounding context-the field on which it operates, the parameters that it takes as given or changeable-is, however, far from simple. Historically, social democracy has built its platform around the idea of progress, around interpreting modernity, defining it, indeed, representing modern times and carrying the future. From its birth somewhere between the French and the Industrial Revolutions, it recognized capitalism as a force capable of bringing about that modernity. It saw its own role as that of the catalyst. The fundamental paradox of social democracy is that the recognition of capitalism as the fundamental means to social progress brings about therecognition of capitalism itself. There is an important but rather fine line between socialism and capitalism in the history of social democracy.
Social democracy, then, is not a social movement that is simply adapting to new orders of production. It is intimately involved in bringing them about. It is not possible to separate the economy as an objective sphere from our understanding and interpretation of it and from the way that historical agents intervene into it, thus creating in the process the boundaries between the economic and the social or the cultural. The making sense of new times is also creating them, through discourse and ideology and through policy and institutions. Here, the notion of the knowledge society fulfils a similar function for the Third Way that the notion of the industrial society did for nascent social democracy in the 1880s or that the idea of the affluent society did for social democratic revisionists in the 1950s. As Bob Jessop suggests, the idea of a knowledge-based economy has emerged in the post-Fordist world as a pervasive metanarrative, the function of which is not just interpretative but constitutive of the new economy because it motivates modes and means of governance designed to bring it about. Just as social democracy was a central historical agent behind the bringing about of industrial modernity, the Third Way with its notion of the new economy is a key agent in creating knowledge capitalism.
The relationship between interpretation and construction is one of the fundamental dilemmas of social democracy, following its ambiguous relationship with capitalism. Social democracy has not, in history, been primarily concerned with the overthrow of capitalism and hence with the radical alternative. Rather, it is a social movement firmly caught between its radical critique of capitalism and its emphasis on the gradual improvement of capitalism. These two seemingly irreconcilable political strategies are not irreconcilable in the history of social democracy. Rather its history is the history of trying to marry utopian critique and pragmatic stances in its various bouts of revisionism. In the history of social democracy, modernization discourse is about such attempts at reconciliation. In the late nineteenth century, social democracy broke away from utopian socialism by presenting itself as the practical alternative. With the rise of reformism in the interwar period, it replaced notions of revolution with an appeal to nation and prosperity. In the 1950s, it took a further step down the revisionist road when it focused on the efficient management of affluence. Nevertheless, utopian critique and discourses of improvement are distinct political and discursive strategies, leading in different directions, with the former calling for radical alternatives and another future and the latter leading to political compromise and the wish to bring about efficiency and prosperity within the framework of the market economy. The tension between utopian critique and discourses of pragmatic improvement is a fundamental dilemma of social democracy.
This has important implications for the substantial discussion in the literature on how to define the "new" social democracy in relation to what "old" social democracy was. There are two problems here. The first one is the construction of radical newness, break, and discontinuity, which has characterized much of the political and academic writing on contemporary social democracy. In particular, the literature about New Labour saw this newness in its abdication of socialism in favor of market capitalism or even neoliberalism. This has set in place a dichotomy between old and new, which is not very helpful for understanding the complex origins and trajectories of social democracy either historically or in the present. It is clearly not possible, from any reading of social democracy's history, to argue that the Third Way's embracing of the market signifies a decisive break with old social democracy because social democracy has always grappled with questions of markets and capitalist efficiency. On the other hand, suggestions that the Third Way stands in continuity with "old" social democracy have often been simplistic. Studies of ideological change have often led to accounts of the evolutionary nature of social democratic ideology, where revisionism becomes a kind of learning process, an unproblematic adaptation to altered socioeconomic circumstances. From this perspective, the Third Way tends to become equated with previous periods of revisionism as if social democratic ideology evolved in a historical continuity of revisionism and ideological change was an unproblematic question of adaptation to altered socioeconomic circumstances. From this perspective, the meaning of modernization in each period in the history of social democracy is not problematized, and the Third Way becomes "a further step towards the reassessment of issues which leftwing parties have long been confronted with and addressed."
In a recent study, Sheri Berman suggests that the historic project of social democracy was its marrying of capitalism and democracy and that the twentieth century can be seen as the historic victory of social democracy over fascism and market fundamentalism. This is an important point, and it reminds us of the importance of social democracy's past achievements. But one might argue that the relevance of the Third Way is exactly the manner in which it has undone this "victory" by abdicating central principles of democracy and equality-all in the name of the market. Somehow I do not think that this would have been possible were it not for the fact that the market has always occupied a central place in social democratic ideology. In another study of British Labour and Swedish social democracy, Jonas Hinnfors argues that social democracy was always "market friendly," and so there is nothing fundamentally new in the market orientation of the Third Way. While this is clearly true on some level, it does not seem to provide us with the bigger picture. Clearly, social democracy did things before that it does not do today, and it does some things today that it did not do before, and moreover it does them differently. Indeed, its notion of the market is not the same, nor is its notion of intervention. Social democracy has "always" been concerned with prosperity, which is why the concept of growth is a key element in social democratic ideology. However, its understanding of what drives the process of value creation, the relationship of growth as means or end to other ideological objectives, and the role of the market economy to create it, are key elements of ideological change. What distinguishes the Third Way from "old" social democracy, then, is not a sudden acceptance of market forces or a new procapitalist stance; rather it is the way that it gives new meaning to its historic articulations around capitalism in relationship to new ideas of what drives prosperity in the new economy. This is by no means an innocuous process. On the contrary, it is a process that changes the very meaning of social democracy.
Sassoon writes that "revisionism involves rejecting old policies, not old ethical principles, old ways of achieving desirable ends, not the ends." The problem with this argument, often repeated by social democracy's modernizers, is that what is a means to an end is not a constant in social democratic history; rather, the hierarchy between means and ends is historically specific. The concept of equality, for instance, has become equality of opportunity in British discourse, which is, moreover, not the same concept in Gordon Brown's use as it was in Anthony Crosland's. Is equality a means for opportunity, or is opportunity the means for equality? In Swedish social democratic discourse, strong links exist between the notions of growth and security. But is security the means for growth or growth the means for security? The meaning of concepts such as equality or security change in periods of revisionism, even if the words remain the same, and they must therefore be considered historic objectives, defined again at each specific period in time. This is not an innocuous process of evolution: It involves strategic ideological choices and, arguably, these choices are what define the soul of social democracy. The discussions of means and ends, eternal values and new realities, are necessarily about ideological change.
This does not mean that each period of revisionism makes a radical break with the social democratic past, as was suggested by many Third Way proponents in the mid-1990s. Part of revisionist projects is the relocation of undesired ideological luggage to the past and the claim to break with previous ideologies. However, there is an important element of intertextuality and interdependency between periods of revisionism, as modernizers lean on and reread the modernizers who preceded them. Social democracy is not a movement that likes to break with its past; rather, it goes to great lengths to establish continuities backwards. History is one of its main sources of legitimacy. Swedish Social Democrats are at pains to stay within a carefully choreographed story of continuity that begins with Hjalmar Branting, Per Albin Hansson, and Ernst Wigforss; and New Labour, despite its need to claim new territory, has kept returning to Anthony Crosland, R. H. Tawney, and William Beveridge. Even arch modernizers are, in this sense, anchored in rereadings of past ideologies, and even New Labour's Third Way, in its self-proclaimed newness, drew on the Third Ways that came before it. There is revisionism, then, also in the historiographical meaning of the term, in the sense of rereading, reinterpreting, and redefining the social democratic past itself, thereby laying down the ideological heritage for new times. Revisionism does not take place as a break with the past but as the reinterpretation and rearticulation of the past. This is a selective and quintessentially ideological process. The SAP's reading of the Keynesian economist Wigforss, in defence of its 1980s austerity policies, and New Labour's reading of Crosland in 1994, in defence of its reinvented concept of equality of opportunity, are examples of this historiographical nature of revisionism.
But what kind of ideology, then, guides social democracy today? Indisputably, the Third Way represents a form of social democracy reformatted, as it were, for a new era. The Third Way was and is social democracy's attempt to put a social face on capitalism with the means that it sees at its disposition. From a historical perspective, however, until now the Third Way has been strangely myopic. It contains a number of assumptions and postulates that seem distinct from old social democracy, not only in means but in the fundamental values that define what social democracy is. In an excellent study, Gerassimos Moschonas argues that the Third Way signifies a "decisive ideological leap," through which social democracy has been transformed "from a political force for the moderate promotion of equality within an economic system that is by definition inegalitarian, to a force for the moderate promotion of inequality in the face of forces that are even more inegalitarian." In this way, Moschonas suggests, the transformation of social democracy has meant the dissolution of an historical node of social reformism: the idea that the role of the state is to protect the wage earners, the disadvantaged, and society's weakest against the forces of deregulation and the market, a node that has not been questioned during previous periods of revisionism. This is a tough verdict on the Third Way. The decisiveness of the leap, for instance, is debatable because social democracy is a contradictory, multifaceted project across time and space. It is also questionable whether social democracy is really no longer interested in society's weakest (or, alternatively, if it really ever was, in its historical form, organized around a historic subject of the male industrial worker). Indisputably, the Third Way contains a strong interest in questions of inequality and social cohesion, but the meaning of these terms in the contemporary is crucial. Further, the Third Way clearly links issues of inequalities and social exclusion to the efficient functioning of capitalism, as social democracy has traditionally done. New Labour has argued passionately that what is fair is also efficient and that neoliberalism was not efficient, with the social costs that it brought in terms of unemployment and poverty. But this leaves us with the question of what social democracy today considers to be an efficient society.
In this book, my perspective on the Third Way is that it does add up to a fundamental ideological change in social democracy's outlook on capitalism. Social democratic ideology today, I argue, is distinct from ideologies in the history of social democracy because it turns arguments that historically were arguments in critique of capitalist structures into arguments for these structures. In this process, discourses of utopian alternative become discourses of improvement and efficiency-discourses of the management of knowledge capitalism. It is clear that since 1989 there has not been, in the established Left, any serious debate on alternatives to capitalism. What we know as the Third Way is an expression of social democracy in the new political space that this absence of radical alternative creates. What is left, in the absence of utopia and radical critique, is the sphere of improvement and regulation, of managing progress and of steering change. On the one hand, this seems like a sea change. On the other, one has to ask the question, How different is such managerialism from social democracy's historical discourses of rationalization, improvement, and efficiency?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Library and the Workshop by Jenny Andersson Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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