THE PECILAR GENIUS OF THE THIRD WAY...:

Social democracy is dead. Now let's move on: Across Europe, labour parties are reinventing themselves to stay relevant, but they've been redundant for decades. (Michael Fitzpatrick, 11/14/11, spiked)

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.

...is to turn laborers into capitalists, which is how it destroys Labour, and to do so by forcing and aiding them to accumulate capital, which is how it transcends Conservatism.

Posted by oj at November 14, 2011 3:54 PM
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