2. On Sustainbility: This Time of Social Democracy
28 January 2011
Social democrats: do they know where they are aiming? Do they have a notion of ‘good society’ worth fighting for? I doubt it. I believe they don’t. Not in the part of the world we inhabit, at any rate. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is on record squinting at both Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s estates and saying, quite a few years ago, that there is no capitalist or socialist economy, only good or bad. For a long time now, at least thirty to forty years, the policy of social democratic parties has been articulated, one year of neoliberalism rule after another, by the principle ‘whatever you (the centre-right) do, we (the centre-left) can do better’.
Sometimes, although not very often, a particularly outrageous and arrogant initiative taken by the rulers provokes a pang of old socialist conscience. It’s at such times that, without making a big issue out of it, for ‘those who need it most’ or a ‘softening of the blow’ for those ‘whom it hits most’, more compassion and a longer lifeline are demanded – but of course not before it has been tested for prospective electoral popularity – and even more frequently by borrowing the phrases and vocabulary of ‘the other side’.
This state of affairs has its reason: social democracy has lost its own separate constituency – its social fortresses and ramparts, the enclosures inhabited by people at the receiving end of political and economic actions, waiting and yearning to be recast or lift themselves from the collection of victims into an integrated collective subject of interests, political agenda and political agency all of its own. Such a constituency has been all but pulverised into an aggregate of self-concerned and self-centred individuals, competing for jobs and promotions, with little if any awareness of the commonality of fate and even less inclination to close ranks and demand solidary action.
‘Solidarity’ was a phenomenon endemic to the now bygone society of producers; it is but a nostalgia-bred fancy in the society of consumers. Members of this brave new society are notorious for swarming the same shops on the same date and hour, ruled now by the ‘invisible hand of the market’ with the same efficiency as when they were herded onto factory floors and in front of assembly lines by bosses and their hired supervisors.
Lost Time and Tribe
Recast as consumers first and producers a distant (and not necessary) second, the former ‘social democratic constituency’ dissolved in the rest of the aggregate of solitary consumers, knowing of no other ‘common interest’ as that of the taxpayers’. No wonder that the extant heirs of social democratic movements have their eyes focused on the ‘middle ground’ (not so long ago referred to as the ‘middle classes’) – and rally to the defence of the ‘taxpayers’ no longer, ostensibly, divided by their interests and so being the sole ‘public’ from which a solidary electoral support seems plausibly obtained. Both parts of the current political spectrum hunt and graze on the same ground, trying to sell their ‘policy product’ to the same clients. No room here for a ‘utopia of one’s own’! Not enough, at any rate, in a space separating one general election from the next.
‘The left’ – so José Saramago noted on 9th June 2009 in his diary – ‘does not appear to have noticed that it has become very much like the right’. But it has indeed become ‘very much like the right’.
A movement that in the past succeeded in representing one of the greatest hopes for humanity, capable of spurring us to action by the simple resort of an appeal to what is best in human nature, I saw, over the passage of time, undergoing a change in its social composition, … daily moving further away from its early promises, becoming more and more like its old adversaries and enemies, as if this were the only possible means of achieving acceptance, and so ending up becoming a faint replica of what it once was, employing concepts to justify certain actions, which it formerly used to argue against. It has sold out to the right, and once it realises this, it can ask itself what has created the entrenched distance between it and its natural supporters – the poor, the needy, but also the dreamers – in relation to what still remains of its principles. For it is no longer possible to vote for the left if the left has ceased to exist.
It is the right, and the right only, that with the left’s consent assumed the uncontested dictatorship over the political agenda of the day. It is the right that decides what is in and what is out, what can be spoken and what ought/must become/remain unspeakable. It is the right, with the connivance of the left, that draws the line separating the possible from the impossible – and thereby has made self-fulfilling Margaret Thatcher’s sentence of there-being-no-alternative to itself.
The message to the poor and needy cannot be clearer: there is no alternative to the society that makes room for poverty and for needs stripped of the prospects of satisfaction, but no room for dreams and dreamers.