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Jeremy Gilbert
If social democracy has a future, then it can only lie in fully accepting the lessons of its own past, both distant and recent. Today, almost exactly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is surely clear that the record of reforming governments before and after that momentous event has belied many of the confident assumptions shared by moderate progressives in the twentieth century. Far from extending the domain of non-market social relations through gradual development of public institutions, social democracy has been in retreat and on the defensive, forced to accommodate to a capitalism whose self-confidence and audacity have reached unprecedented levels in the unipolar world of the Washington consensus. Even in contexts such as the UK, where public spending has been restored to something like normal European levels under New Labour, this has only been possible on the basis of a radical re-modelling of relationships within the public sector that has taken commercial market relations as an absolute ideal. This has occurred within the context of continued massive transfers of service provision to the private sector.
Of course, this situation did not actually emerge in 1989. In fact, 1989 marked only the culminating point of a process which began a further twenty years earlier. Since the late 1960s an interconnected set of historical changes had engendered a transformation in social relations, undermining both the efficacy and the legitimacy of most of the bureaucratic systems of the earlier twentieth century. From the welfare state to Soviet socialism, collectivist instruments of government were thrown into disarray by the new technologies of the cybernetic revolution, the new social demands of '1968', the intensified individualism of consumer culture and the new capitalist techniques of the post-Fordist economy. The chronic inability of social democracy to adapt to these changes - without simply reversing its historic commitment to defending a democratic public sphere from commercial relations and interests - must surely be quite evident by now. The lesson is clear enough: western European social democracy as it became established in the twentieth century was always a far more fragile construct than it liked to believe, and far more dependent than it realised on a very specific set of social, technological and geo-political circumstances.
Just consider this: in recent years, in countries such as the UK, one of the key sites for the spread and intensification of capitalist social relations, and for the development of new sources of profit, has been precisely the institutions of the welfare state. The General Agreement on Trade in Services, one of the key pieces of international legislation enacted by the WTO in recent years, was specifically designed to turn the kinds of public services that have been developed outside of the market economy by social-democratic governments since the 1930s into sources of profit, objects of commercial speculation and competition. Who would have imagined in 1965 that such a thing was even possible? In fact, in the absence of the communist threat in the East and a powerful labour movement in the West, capital found it remarkably easy to enact such a programme, even with 'left-of-centre' governments in power for much of the intervening period. What lesson must we draw?
The lesson we must draw is that social democrats were always quite mistaken to imagine that they had somehow tamed capitalism, domesticated it, reinvented it. This was never what had really happened. Capitalism had been fought back, pushed out of large areas of social life, kept at bay by the threat of labour militancy or even military conquest; but it had never been transformed. In fact it could never have been transformed: the history of the past few decades has made very clear that it cannot be. It can only be contained, regulated, opposed to various degrees (or not, as the case may be). The language of much contemporary social democracy continues to imply that there are many possible kinds of capitalism, from the fierce purity of American liberal capitalism to the cosy egalitarianism of the German or even Scandinavian models of 'welfare capitalism'. In fact, this is a catastrophic analytical mistake. The differences between these different societies are not differences between different types of capitalism, but between different types of social formation, within which capitalism as such - which is to say, the relentless pursuit of profit through the production and circulation of commodities and the exploitation of wage labour - is allowed to operate more or less freely, within smaller or larger regions of social life.
The importance of this analytical distinction is that it draws our attention to the fact that any programme which wants to defend some areas of social life from market relations must accept that in doing so it is never merely reforming capitalism, but is rather opposing it directly, in however limited and localised a way; and that in order to do so it must seek to build up alternative sources of social power and authority to those of capital and its institutions. The key point is this: although there are many kinds of society within which capitalism may play an important role, there is nonetheless only one kind of capitalism, and the social-democratic question is how to contain it, direct it and limit its scope; not simply how to make it work differently. From this perspective, social democrats need not be revolutionaries in the old sense, dreaming of a complete annihilation of all capitalist social relations; but they must realise that without recovering something of the analytical clarity and anti-capitalist militancy of the revolutionary tradition, they can only ever be engaged in a losing fight.
Jeremy Gilbert teaches cultural studies at the University of East London and is the author of Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics (Berg 2008)
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