Tony Judt and the Limitations of Social Democracy
CHRIS MAISANO
Ill Fares the Land
by Tony Judt
The Penguin Press, 2010, 237 pp
$25.95
In December, the New York Review of Books transcribed an October 2009 speech delivered by the eminent historian Tony Judt at New York University under the title “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?” A major address by Judt on this topic would ordinarily be worth paying attention to regardless of the circumstances. But the speech was infused with an additional urgency by the knowledge that he had recently been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis – Lou Gehrig’s disease – an incurable condition that will kill him sooner rather than later. In liberal intellectual circles, the response to the speech was immediate and laudatory. In response to popular demand, Judt has expanded his remarks into the short book called Ill Fares the Land, a sharply written polemic that seeks to explain the rise of neoliberalism and calls for a revitalized social democratic politics for the 21st century.
Judt starts out with a shot across the reader’s bow. “Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today,” he writes. “For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.” This sense of moral outrage pervades the book and shapes its narrative framework.
That narrative goes roughly like this. From the late 19th century through the 1970s, Western societies became more egalitarian largely because of the efforts of socialists, the labor movement, and others who were appalled by the brutality of untrammeled capitalism to build political institutions that would protect the vast majority from the pervasive insecurities inflicted by decades of depression and war. The crowning achievement of these efforts was the postwar establishment of social democratic regimes across Western Europe and the dominance of New Deal welfare liberalism in the United States. However, as memories of war and depression faded and a new generation raised in the warm embrace of the welfare state chafed at its sometimes paternalistic restrictions, the social democratic consensus was broken and Thatcher, Reagan, and the neoliberal project they represented stepped into the breach. The results: the displacement of the political by the economic, the fraying of social fabrics, and a delegitmation of the democratic state. If this situation is to be reversed, the legitimacy of the state must be restored and government’s role in economic redistribution and regulation must be reestablished.
Most of us on the left would instinctually identify with this general argument, and indeed there is a great deal of truth in it. There’s no doubt that the dismantling of postwar social democracy and its North American equivalent has been a personal disaster for millions of poor and working people across the West and a political disaster for the broad left, and that the delegitimation of the state has been an impediment to the revival of progressive politics.
However, Judt’s analysis of the sources of social democracy’s decline is incomplete. For him, the rise of neoliberalism seems to be more the result of a crisis of faith in social democratic thinking, rather than the result of political and economic changes that began to take hold in the 1970s and undermined the viability of the postwar order.
Judt argues that “our problem is not what to do; it is how to talk about it.” He traces the roots of this putatively discursive problem to the New Left: “The young radicals would never have described their purposes in such a way, but it was the distinction between praiseworthy private freedoms and irritating public constraints which most exercised their emotions. And this very distinction, ironically, described the newly emerging Right as well,” unwittingly clearing the ground for the emerging neoliberal order.
There is certainly much to be said for this analysis. The experience of recent decades has shown how easily the freedom to express oneself championed by the New Left generation has been transformed into the freedom to buy the commodities that symbolize supposedly alternative lifestyles (my residency near one of the more pseudo-bohemian precincts of Brooklyn reminds me of the horrible effects of this transformation daily). Moreover, the Western left does seem largely unable to articulate a discursive framework that offers a coherent and comprehensive alternative to the neoliberal worldview.
But these problems ultimately stem from the fact that by the early 1970s, social democracy reached its political and economic limits. The welfare state strengthened the position of organized labor, reducing corporate profits and increasing workers’ political power relative to capital. Social democratic parties and trade unions began to formulate plans to encroach on capital’s control over the means of production; in Sweden the unions proposed the establishment of worker funds that would gradually take ownership of firms away from capitalists, elements of the British Labour Party pushed for more comprehensive forms of economic planning, and the Socialists under Francois Mitterrand moved to nationalize vast swaths of the French economy, including 90% of the country’s banks. These political developments, coupled with the shocks wrought by inflation in commodity prices (especially oil) and a productivity slowdown, ruptured the underpinnings of the postwar order. The crisis could have been resolved by either moving further toward socialism or by breaking radically toward neoliberalism. As we are all painfully aware, the latter option won out. The political and economic power of capital was restored, and the labor movement and left political formations were decimated. We’ve lost the ability to talk about social democracy not simply because of a crisis of faith. It’s because the institutions with the ability to articulate this discursive framework have been defeated (for now, at least).
This points to the fundamental limitation of social democracy, or “socialist capitalism” as Michael Harrington more accurately described it. It’s a compromise between socialism and capitalism, but one that’s made on capitalism’s terms. As Harrington pointed out decades ago in his book Socialism, “the fact is that as long as capitalism is capitalism it vitiates or subverts the efforts of socialists…In fact, capital fights back, it does not meekly accept the programming of social democratic ministers…economic power is political power, and as long as the basic relationships of the economy are left intact, they provide a base for the subversion of the democratic will.”
This doesn’t mean that social democracy is somehow bad – I’d give my right arm and possibly a couple of other vital organs if it would turn the United States into a social democratic country. It just means that in spite of its many virtues – virtues that Judt is correct in celebrating – social democracy cannot be an end in itself but a way station toward a more fundamental transformation of society.
A fine, fine piece and I agree completely with it (except I’m all for delegitimizating the state). If anyone wants to read more about the absolute limits of social democracy I’d recommend Michal Kalecki’s “Political Aspects of Full Employment” http://www.cfeps.org/ss2006/readings/Courvisanos_c.pdf .
Well done, Chris. I almost went to Judt’s talk last fall. Sorry I missed it. I’ve heard he’s actually very ill. I’ve admired Judt’s work as a historian for quite some time but I agree with your assessment of social democracy. Having just returned from France and Spain a few months ago, I finally was able to see for myself the limits of social democracy. 60% of the population of Toledo is unemployed and it shows. While the welfare state is certainly larger in Spain than in the US, these people are stuck in perpetual poverty. Paris is in many ways as socially and economically divided as New York City is right now. These pundits who keep claiming much of Europe is socialist need to walk down Madrid’s shopping district. Capitalism is alive and well in Europe.
Social democrats, as Tony Judt argues in his book, have something to conserve. They have achievements on which to build. When Tony Judt speaks of social democracy, I know what he means.
But what do you mean by socialism? Soviet-style central planning? Nationalizing the “commanding heights” of the economy? What are the other forms? Duncan Foley made an especially smart statement of this question:
http://homepage.newschool.edu/~foleyd/NotesCrisisSocChange.pdf
Well, the sort of socialist economy I think is both desirable and feasible is described here:
http://sites.google.com/site/rebellionsucks/pptnc.htm
See also here: http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/debates/left_futures3.html
I should add, the problems of the 1970s are liable to be part of life in a modern economy. Simon Kuznets explained it well in his Nobel lecture. Every complex, modern economy will have multiple, interdependent institutions between which there will be no natural, automatic harmony. Economic changes of any consequence will have the potential for disruption. Economic growth, said Kuznets, is a “controlled revolution.”
I do not see any arrangement of property that can guarantee harmony. Social democracy is the practice of mollifying these conflicts. If the mere existence of these problems discredits social democracy, then it discredits all social orders this side of the industrial revolution. How can there be a final transcendence? How can there be more than recurring compromise?
The economy is not something visited upon us from beyond, out of some platonic realm, divined by the likes of David Ricardo and his followers. The economy is a creation of social institutions. A deep challenge to reshaping these institutions is, in part, discursive. Socialists no less than social democrats must confront those who speak of the economy in scientistic terms, those who defend a “natural” order that we must not disrupt with our “artificial” interventions.
A few points in response to The Reverend:
- I don’t think any of us would argue that it’s ever going to be possible to reach some sort of final state of transcendence where conflict over political power and economic resources will completely end forever. I certainly would not make that argument, because I think that’s naive.
- I also wouldn’t make the argument that the economy is some sort of abstraction that exists outside society (Polanyi was right about that decades ago and still is), or is subject to immutable, unchanging laws that cannot be altered like many orthodox Marxists thought in the early 20th century, and support social democratic interventions into the economy to propel society in a more egalitarian direction.
- I don’t deny that the problem that the left faces is at least partially discursive. But it’s hard to promote an alternative discursive framework when the institutions that would have the ability to do so (the labor movement and left political formations in particular) have been decimated by neoliberalism. Individual social democrats/socialists can argue in favor of social democracy all we want, and it’s very necessary, but simply writing wonderfully written briefs on behalf of social democracy (of which Judt’s book is an example) isn’t going to summon a social democratic political movement into being.
- I don’t think we’ll be stuck with capitalism forever, just like humanity wasn’t stuck forever with feudalism or other modes of production prior to this one. When or how that transformation happens – and whether or not it will be to socialism or something different and possibly worse – I have no idea. What I was trying to argue is that as long as the structure of the economy remains basically capitalist, the foundations of social democracy are inherently unstable and likely to be undermined by the power of capital. If we want to preserve gains made under social democracy, then we would ultimately have to go beyond it – and admittedly I don’t have much of an answer as to how this would be possible at this point in time. I just think that Judt is too quick to deny the possibility and necessity of radical change in the political economy. It’s clear that we’re going to have to experience some fairly drastic changes in the way the world works if humanity wants to make it to the 22nd century in one piece.
Thank you, Chris. You comment helped immensely. (I should clarify that I have spent more time arguing with market liberals and mainstream economists in the past few years than I have with the left.)
Yes, I would like to see Foley develop his argument to the next stage. Still, the value of the work of Duncan Foley, and I would add Samuel Bowles, is the understanding of political economy. The less people understand the social order they live under, the less likely they are to change it for the better. I consider this subject a deep weakness on the contemporary American left. And by weakness, I mean the subject is too often neglected. But as we aren’t arguing in a vacuum, the neglect is answered by either variants of market liberalism or conspiracists. Confronting these misconceptions is, to a significant extent, a discursive problem.
I just read through that Foley talk. There’s some good stuff in there, but it ends really abruptly and kind of doesn’t go anywhere. What is this last paragraph:
*I would, perhaps oxymoronically, call for a Quiet Revolution, based on skepticism and the critical sifting of knowledge, a revolution that has confidence in what it is talking about and what it is doing, and restlessly re-evaluates its goals and methods. This might even be a revolution driven more by dogged persistence than flaming enthusiasm.*
even supposed to mean? I don’t really know what he’s trying to say here.
Erik Olin Wright had a really good essay in New Left Review a few years ago called Compass Points that I think lays out a really useful framework for people thinking about socialist alternatives in the 21st century. Here’s the link: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/New%20Left%20Review%20paper.pdf
Good stuff Chris. I went off Tony Judt a few years ago when he smeared E.P. Thompson as a Stalinist, and just generally wrote like a Cold War anti-communist in a piece on Leszek Kolakowski in the New York Review of Books. I was a little surprised to see his recent stuff on social democracy – and you characterise it well.
(The NYRB piece was on 21 Sept, 2006 – its supposed to be online but the page doesn’t seem to work. There’s a commentary here: http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2006/09/tony-judt-leszek-kolakowski-and.html )
Also agree on the Foley talk. I’m a big Duncan Foley fan, his economics is great, and I thought it was a good talk right up to the weak last par.