Monday, October 11, 2010

The decay of social-democracy

I. Wallerstein makes a very negative evaluation of the situation of Social-Democracy a century after its inception in his article Does Social-Democracy has a future? 

The key point of the analysis is that Social-Democracy, never too clearly defined anyhow, lost its Socialist and Marxist foundations since the 1970s, becoming just the moderate party party of the Capitalist system (in the USA that would be the Democratic Party, specially the so-called liberals). Today not even a spark of its original concept as pragmatic working class party for Socialism remains.

A big problem I see is that even the parties to the left of the Social-Democrats have become residual vaguely leftist appendages of the decadent Socialdemocracy in most cases. At least in the developed World.

This is very bad because people with clear Left ideas have no parties to vote and people in those parties fear becoming too radical and therefore marginal, so nearly nobody votes for them anyhow. There are exceptions (Germany, Greece, arguably France) but they are rather rare.

This was apparent for instance in the many comments at an article by Carlos Taibo in the blogs of Spanish left wing newspaper Público. While Taibo and most commenters decried the softness and lack of revolutionary or even ecologist discourse by the United Left coalition and its associate union Comisiones Obreras, the militants of this party protested that Taibo and the many commenters just wanted to make them even more marginal.
The result is a stalemate that seems to underline the need for some sort of party at the left of the established (but clearly decaying) left. Alternatively a non-electoral movement may perfectly coalesce around the several anarcho-sindicalist unions that are capitalizing the lack of response by the traditional ones. A potential was created in the context of the last European Parliament elections around the figure of Alfonso Sastre but the massive electoral fraud made impossible to effectively gauge its support outside the Basque Country, where the movement could muster enough election watchers to revert or prevent the abuses. 

What is clear is that United Left has become the old Socialdemocracy and the Social-Democrats have become plain liberals, mere bureaucratic facades with a residually leftist iconography for the management of pure Capitalism.

I understand that as the destruction of the welfare state continues without pause, often under the management of the self proclaimed Social-Democrats, and the living conditions of the working classes are plainly destroyed to 19th century levels, the working class needs of a genuine tool of political organization and that this one will coalesce sooner than later. But the details I cannot foresee and the current situation is anything but hopeful.

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