Ill Fares the Land (14 page)

During the slump and the depression of the ’30s, many self-styled Marxists refused to propose or even debate solutions to the crisis. Like old-fashioned bankers and neo-classical economists, they believed that capitalism has laws that cannot be bent or broken and that there was no point in interfering in its workings. This unyielding commitment rendered many socialists, then and for years to come, unsympathetic to moral challenges: politics, they asserted, are not about rights or even justice. They are about class, exploitation and forms of production.

Thus, socialists and social democrats alike remained to the end in thrall to the core presuppositions of 19th century socialist thought. This residual belief system—its relationship to genuine ideology being roughly that of English low-church Anglicanism to full-blown Catholic orthodoxy—provided a back wall against which anyone calling themselves a social democrat could lean their policies and thereby distinguish themselves from even the most reform-oriented liberal or Christian Democrat.

That is why the fall of Communism mattered so much. With its collapse, there unraveled the whole skein of doctrines which had bound the Left together for over a century. However perverted the Muscovite variation, its sudden and complete disappearance could not but have a disruptive impact on any party or movement calling itself ‘social democratic’.

This was a peculiarity of left-wing politics. Even if every conservative and reactionary regime around the globe were to implode tomorrow, its public image hopelessly tarnished by corruption and incompetence, the politics of conservatism would survive intact. The case for ‘conserving’ would remain as viable as it ever had been. But for the Left, the absence of a historically-buttressed narrative leaves an empty space. All that remains is politics: the politics of interest, the politics of envy, the politics of re-election. Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something that a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Left it is a catastrophe.

From the outset, the democratic Left in Europe saw itself as the reasonable alternative to revolutionary socialism and—in later years—to its Communist successor. Social democracy was thus inherently schizophrenic. While marching confidently forward into a better future, it was constantly glancing nervously over its left shoulder.
We
, it seemed to say, are not authoritarian.
We
are for freedom, not repression.
We
are democrats who also believe in equality, social justice and regulated markets.

So long as the primary aim of social democrats was to convince voters that they were a respectable radical choice within the liberal polity, this defensive stance made sense. But today such rhetoric is incoherent. It is not by chance that a Christian Democrat like Angela Merkel can win an election in Germany against her Social Democratic opponents—even at the height of a financial crisis—with a set of policies that in all its important essentials resembles their own program.

Social democracy, in one form or another, is the prose of contemporary European politics. There are very few European politicians, and fewer still in positions of influence, who would dissent from core social democratic assumptions about the duties of the state, however much they might differ as to their scope. Consequently, social democrats in today’s Europe have nothing distinctive to offer: in France, for example, even their disposition to favor state ownership hardly distinguishes them from the Colbertian instincts of the Gaullist right. The problem today lies not in social democratic policies, but in their exhausted language. Since the authoritarian challenge from the left has lapsed, the emphasis upon “democracy” is largely redundant. We are all democrats today.

—KRZYSZTOF KIEŚŁOWKSI

 

 

 

 

B
ut if we are all ‘democrats’, what now distinguishes us? What do we stand for? We know what we do not want: from the bitter experience of the past century we have learned that there are things that states most certainly should
not
be doing. We have survived an age of doctrines purporting with alarming confidence to say how our rulers should act and to remind individuals—forcibly if necessary—that those in authority know what is good for them. We cannot return to all that.

Conversely, and despite the purported ‘lessons’ of 1989, we know that the state is not
all
bad. The only thing worse than too much government is too little: in failed states, people suffer at least as much violence and injustice as under authoritarian rule, and in addition their trains do not run on time. Moreover, if we give the matter a moment’s thought, we can see that the 20th century morality tale of ‘socialism vs. freedom’ or ‘communism vs. capitalism’ is misleading. Capitalism is not a political system; it is a form of economic life, compatible in practice with right-wing dictatorships (Chile under Pinochet), left-wing dictatorships (contemporary China), social-democratic monarchies (Sweden) and plutocratic republics (the United States). Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think.

Conversely, communism—while clearly inimical to a genuinely free market—can apparently adapt to a variety of economic arrangements, though it inhibits the efficiency of all of them. Thus we were correct to suppose that the fall of communism put an end to over-confident claims on behalf of planning and central control; but it is not clear what other conclusions we should draw. And it simply does not follow that communism’s failure discredited all state provision or economic planning.

The real problem facing us in the aftermath of 1989 is not what to think of communism. The vision of total social organization—the fantasy which animated utopians from Sydney Webb to Lenin, from Robespierre to Le Corbusier—lies in ruins. But the question of how to organize ourselves for the common benefit remains as important as ever. Our challenge is to recover it from the rubble.

As anyone who has traveled or lived in post-Communist eastern Europe will know, the transition from repressive egalitarianism to unconstrained greed is not attractive. There is no shortage of people in the region today who would enthusiastically second the view that the point of political freedom is to make money. Certainly this is the view of President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, and he is not alone.

But why should the sight of a handful of greedy businessmen doing well out of the collapse of an authoritarian state be so much more pleasing to our eyes than authoritarianism itself? Both suggest something profoundly amiss in a society. Freedom is freedom. But if it leads to inequality, poverty and cynicism, then we should say so rather than sweep its shortcomings under the rug in the name of the triumph of liberty over oppression.

By the end of the 20th century, social democracy in Europe had fulfilled many of its longstanding policy objectives, but largely forgotten or abandoned its original rationale. From Scandinavia to Canada, the political Left and the institutions it inaugurated rested on ‘cross class’ alliances of workers and farmers, blue collar workers and the middle class. It is the defection of the latter that poses the greatest challenge to the welfare states and the parties that had brought them into being. Despite being the chief beneficiaries of welfare legislation in much of Europe and North America, the growing share of western electorates that identified with the ‘middle’ was increasingly skeptical and resentful of the tax burden imposed on it in order to maintain egalitarian institutions.

The growth in unemployment over the course of the 1970s added to the strain on the public exchequer and lowered its tax revenue. Moreover, the inflation of those years increased the tax and insurance burden—if only nominally—upon those still employed. Since the latter were disproportionately better skilled and educated, they came to resent this. What had once been implicitly accepted as a reciprocal arrangement came to be described as ‘unfair’: the benefits of the welfare state were now ‘excessive’.

Whereas in the 1940s the majority of manual workers paid no tax and were thus net beneficiaries of the new social benefits, by the 1970s—once again thanks to inflation as well as wage increases—many of them had entered middle class tax brackets. Moreover, with the passage of time, they had retired—and were thus drawing benefits in the form of pensions and age-related public provisions (free bus passes, subsidized performances at theaters and concert halls). These were now being paid for by their children, who had no first-hand memory of the Depression and the war and thus no direct familiarity with the circumstances that had given rise to these provisions. They just resented their cost.

From a pessimistic perspective, the social democratic ‘moment’ thus failed to outlast its founding generation. As the beneficiaries aged and memory faded, the appeal of expensive
états providentiaux
waned accordingly. This process accelerated over the course of the ’80s and ’90s as the neo-liberal regimes of the age selectively taxed universal benefits: a surreptitious reintroduction of the means test that was calculated to diminish middle class enthusiasm for social services now perceived as benefiting only the very poor.

Are
social democracy and welfare states insupportably expensive? Much has been made of the apparently absurd provisions for early retirement on near-full pay from which many European public sector workers now benefit—at substantial and unpopular cost to private sector taxpayers. One well-known instance concerns train drivers in France, entitled to retire in their fifties on a generous and inflation-protected pension. How, critics ask, can any efficient economy survive such burdens?

When (Communist-dominated) rail unions negotiated these packages shortly after the Second World War, the railwaymen were a very different class of worker. Typically recruited straight from school at the age of thirteen, they had been doing dangerous manual work—operating steam engines—for upwards of four decades. By retirement in their early fifties, they were exhausted: often sick and with a life expectancy rarely in excess of ten years. Generous pensions were the least they could reasonably ask, and the burden on the state was easily tolerated.

Today’s TGV drivers spend their working day comfortably ensconced in a warm (or air-conditioned) cab, and the nearest they come to manual labor is when they press a series of electric switches to activate their machinery. For them to retire before the age of fifty-five appears absurd. It is certainly expensive: thanks to the medical and other provisions of the French welfare state, such men may reasonably expect to live well into their eighties. This places a significant burden upon the public finances, as well as on the annual budget of the state railways.

But the answer is not to abolish the principle of generous retirement packages, medical provision and other welfare goods. Politicians need to find the courage to insist (in this case) upon a significant raising of the retirement age—and then justify themselves to their constituents. But such changes are unpopular, and politicians today eschew unpopularity at almost any cost. To a very considerable extent, the dilemmas and shortcomings of the welfare state are a result of political pusillanimity rather than economic incoherence.

Nonetheless, the problems facing social democracy are real. Without an ideological narrative, and shorn of its self-described ‘core’ constituencies, it has become something of an orphan in the wake of the euphoric delusions of post-’89. And few can deny that welfarism, taken to extremes, carries a whiff of do as you’re told!: there were moments in postwar Scandinavia when the enthusiasm for eugenics and social efficiency suggested not just a certain insensitivity to recent history but also to the natural human desire for autonomy and independence.

Moreover, as Leszek Kołakowski once observed, the welfare state entails protecting the weak majority from the strong and privileged minority. Reasonable as it sounds, this principle is implicitly undemocratic and potentially totalitarian. But social democracy has never descended into authoritarian rule. Why? Is it democratic institutions that keep politicians honest? More likely, it was the deliberately inconsistent application of the logic of the protective state which preserved its democratic form.

Unfortunately, pragmatism is not always good politics. The greatest asset of mid-20th century social democracy—its willingness to compromise its own core beliefs in the name of balance, tolerance, fairness and freedom—now looks more like weakness: a loss of nerve in the face of changed circumstances. We find it hard to look past those compromises to recall the qualities that informed progressive thought in the first place: what the early 20th century syndicalist Edouard Berth termed “a revolt of the spirit against . . . a world in which man was threatened by a monstrous moral and metaphysical materialism”.

—JOHN STUART MILL

 

 

 

 

W
hat, then,
should
we have learned from 1989? Perhaps, above all, that nothing is either necessary or inevitable. Communism did not have to happen—and there was no reason why it should last forever; but nor had we any grounds for being confident that it would fall. Progressives must take onboard the sheer contingency of politics: neither the rise of the welfare states nor their subsequent fall from grace should be treated as a gift from History. The social democratic ‘moment’—or its American counterpart from the New Deal to the Great Society—was the product of a very particular combination of circumstances unlikely to repeat themselves. The same can be said of the neo-liberal ‘moment’ which began in the 1970s and has only now run itself into the ground.