Has social democracy a future?
David Marquand
Unlike its central European cousins, British social democracy is not a party or a move ment; it is barely even a doctrine. There are no authoritative social-democratic texts to which the reader can be referred, and no recognised social-democratic leaders whose statements commit their followers. People with social-democratic views can be found in all three parties; though most social democrats belong to the Labour Party, there is at least a case for saying that the most impressive social-democratic politician of the last 30 years was the author of The Middle Way, Harold Macmillan. Partly because of this, few politicians actually call themselves social democrats: Tony Crosland, perhaps the greatest socialdemocratic theorist of his generation, indignantly repudiated the description as intellectually vacuous and historically inaccurate.
But it does not follow that he was right. No one who has sat through an economic debate in the House of Commons can deny that there are three distinct schools of thought on the central issues of domestic politics. At one end of the spectrum are the socialists, who believe that the classical Marxist analysis of capitalism is still valid, and who wish to replace the existing mixed economy with a wholly or largely publiclyowned one. At the other end is a less coherent, but still recognisable, group of neo-liberals, for whom state intervention in the economy is inherently suspect and private ownership inherently preferable to public ownership. In between is a third group, whose members accept the mixed economy, with roughly the present boundaries between the public and private sectors, if not as positively desirable, then at any rate as less undesirable than any conceivable alternative.
The members of this third group acknowledge that it may sometimes be necessary to extend the public sector, but they do not believe that public ownership is inherently better than private ownership — or, for that matter, that private ownership is inherently better than public ownership. Most of them would probably agree that, in present circumstances, it would be right to rely more heavily on the market and less heavily on the state. But they would not agree that it is always right to do so, or that state intervention is somehow wrong on principle. They would agree with the neo-liberals that complete public ownership is incompatible with personal freedom, but they would agree with the socialists that a pure market economy, with no state intervention, is incompatible with social justice.
Since most political issues are issues of more-or-less, not issues of yes-or-no, the boundaries between the third group and the other two are bound to be fuzzy in practice. On some issues it will side with the socialists and on others with the .neo-liberals; occasionally, it will wobble from one to the other. Since it straddles the existing party divisions, its members will sometimes find themselves voting, and even speaking, against each other, when in fact they agree; since it has no all-embracing, monolithic creed, they will often disagree. Even so, they have more in common with each other than any of them has with either of the other groups, at any rate on the questions which matter most. More important still, they have a common cast of mind, and a common conception of how politics should be conducted. Though this is less obvious, they also share a common tradition.
It is a confused, inchoate tradition, drawing', its inspiration from a wide variety of sources. Its Conservative members can claim to be acting in the spirit of Disraeli, or Burke, or even Bolingbroke. Labour ones can trace their intellectual descent, rather more plausibly, from the Webbs to Arthur Henderson to the post-war Labour Government. Liberals can point to Beveridge and Lloyd George and, if they are of a philosophical turn of mind, to T.H. Green and John Stuart Mill. But in spite of all this confusion, the tradition undoubtedly exists. Though it has some socialist antecedents, it is not a socialist tradition; though Conservative members of it seem to feel happier if they can appeal to the ghosts of Conservative worthies, it is not a Conservative tradition either.
It could be described as 'liberal', but for the fact that the once-dead tradition of classical liberalism, which has quite different practical implications, has suddenly risen from the grave to dispute the title with it. Since no other title fits, and since the contemporary version of Central European social democracy is very close to it in practice, it can best be described as socialdemocratic.
After a generation as the dominant tradition in British politics, it is now on the defensive. The most obvious reason is that, like most tolerant and optimistic approaches to politics, it is a child of prosperity. Eduard Bernstein, the father of modern German social democracy, based his challenge, to orthodox Marxism on the discovery that the proletariat was getting richer instead of poorer. The two most important influences on the British version were late 19th-century Fabianism and early 20th-century New Liberalism — both comfortable creeds, which held that politics should be about the just distribution of wealth, the continued production of which could be taken for granted. Among more recent figures, it owes most to Keynes, the most persuasive and effective prophet of economic hope in modern times. But prophets of hope are not popular when times are bad — or not, at any rate, if they offer gradual amelioration rather than a glorious millennium. In bad times,optim ism looks like complacency, and tolerance like cowardice. Because the present is dark, men assume that the future will be dark too; and the cry goes up for heroism and self sacrifice. Social democracy has sometimes inspired heroism — one thinks of Kurt Schumacher and Leon Blum defying the Nazi torturers — but it does not sound heroic. It is a creed of the second best, or incremental improvements and marginal adjustments, of compromise and adaptation. If its economist is Keynes, its philosopher is Popper, hammer of utopianism and of all forms of historicism. Social democrats do not believe in the possibility of a Good Society: for them, politics is about solving problems, not about striving bravely for grandiose and distant goals. But they do believe that it is possible to make society better than it is now, and that it is better now than it used to be.
After five years of recession, which. no government has yet come near to solving, such an attitude is bound to seem tame and bloodless. And the recession has hurt social democracy in a more direct way too. Social democrats have always insisted on having the best of both worlds — a reasonable degree of equality and a reasonable amount of Personal freedom, social justice and high living standards. Since the war, they have been astonishingly successful. All western societies are much more equal than they Ilsed to be. Inevitably, a price has to be paid In personal freedom, but until recently the Price was worth paying. These achievements, however, were made possible only by the unprecedented boom of the Fifties and Sixties, which created the surplus for social-democratic governments to redistribute. Now there is no boom and no surplus; and the old, harsh doctrines of early capitalism __ Marxism on the left and classical liberalism on the right — have come back into fashion, underpinned by the tacit assumption that, since we have had no economic growth for the last five years, we shall never have economic growth again. If that assumption were valid, there would be no point in speculating about the future of social democracy: it would have no future. If growth really has come to a permanent stop, peaceful redistribution is !mpossible; and social democracy is impossible too. Marx and Malthus will have been proved right, and the class war will presumably break out again. But although it is becoming less and less fashionable to say so, I see no reason to believe that growth has stepped. It has been going on for several thousand years, albeit with interruptions, and the odds are that it will continue to go on, doubtless with more interruptions. The fact that no one has yet managed to spring the trap of inflation-and-recession in Which the industrialised world has been caught since the early Seventies does not Prove that it cannot be sprung, any more than the fact that Montagu Norman and Philip Snowden failed 1 to overcome the Great Depression proves that no one could have overcome it. Of course, it cannot be sprung without big changes in the pattern of economic activity and the behaviour of Fcanomic agents; in a sluggish, backwardlooking society like this one, such changes will be hard to make. But to assume that they cannot be made, that our stock of social inventiveness has now run out, is to Mistake abdication for analysis. To say that growth is possible is not, however, to say that it will happen — still less that social democrats will make it happen. What is clear is that no one else can do so. Marxist socialism has failed wherever it has been tried, and there is no reason to believe that the variety on offer here would be any more successful than those which have been *led elsewhere, The spectacle of the pres ent Government hurtling down a neoliberal cul-de-sac evokes an astonished admiration, of the sort which the Russian gunners must have felt as they watched the charge of the light brigade, but that road is no more promising than the socialist one. Sooner or later, someone's nerve is going to crack, either Mrs Thatcher's or her party's. If it is hers, the present Government will make the inevitable U-turn back to social democracy. If it is her party's, some other government will. That the U-turn will come seems to me almost beyond doubt.
The interesting question is what happens after that, Will the instalment of social democracy which follows the present neoliberal interregnum be more successful than those which followed the neo-liberal interregnum of 1970-72 and the quasi-socialist interregnum of 1974-1975? Or will yet other social-democratic government go down to defeat, presumably to be followed by yet another interregnum?
The answer is that it all depends on the • social democrats. Social democracy failed in 1972-1974 and again in 1975-1979 largely because it was fighting with one hand behind its back. In 1972, Mr Heath broke totally and decisively with the policies on which he had been elected. But because he had to carry his party with him — or thought he had to carry his party with him —he could not make it clear how total the break was, or explain unambiguously what his new policies meant. The same was true, though in a different way, of Messrs Wilson and Callaghan after 1975. Everyone could see that a U-turn had been made, but because the government which had made it dared not admit that it had done so, it could not explain why; and because it could not explain why, it could not win public support for the change. Each time, it was as though the grand old duke of York had insisted that he was still marching up the hill, even though his men could see perfectly well that they were marching down. To put it at its lowest, that was not a good way to maintain morale among the troops. But the one absolute certainty about the political economy of modern Britain is that no economic strategy can succeed without public support. The notion that we can be slapped into economic sanity like naughty schoolchildren — or even that we can be nagged into it like a hen pecked husband — is foolish as well as nasty. Almost by definition, virtually every change that is needed if the British economy is to recover runs counter to the vested interests of some more or less powerful producer group. The neoliberals assume that, if market forces are let rip, these vested interests will be smashed. If we were living in 1879 instead of 1979, they might be right. But in a modern economy, dominated by giant firms and huge trade unions, market forces can't rip. The only other way of making the changes is to appeal over the heads of the producer groups to the general public. No British government has managed to do so since the Attlee Government left office in 1951. It cannot be done by social ists or neo-liberals, if only because socialism and neo-liberalism are anathema to large sections of the public and command only minority support. If it is to be done at all, it will have to be by social democrats, for even in its current doldrums social democracy is still much nearer to the centre of opinion in the country than any of its rivals. But if the next social-democratic government is to be more successful than the last two, it will have to consist of open social democrats, sailing under their own colours, not of covert ones, sailing under other people's.
It will also have to operate a different kind of social democracy — more libertarian and less bureaucratic, more concerned with creativity and less with tidiness, more anxious to devolve power and less eager to concentrate it, more responsible to the New Liberal elements in its heritage and less to the Fabian or, for that matter, to the Conservative ones. In the long run, the most important question in British politics is whether social democracy can be revised in this way and, if so, how. In the short run, an even more important question is whether the social democrats, now scattered through the three main parties, will recognise that the links of principle that unite them are more important than the party loyalties that divide them, and that if the British economy is to recover they will have to stand together against the millennialists of right and left. If they do this, social democracy may have a future. If they don't, it hasn't. Nor has the British economy.
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