The Impasse of Social Democratic Politics

Abstract

The notion of gradual but inevitable progress toward socialism through the vehicle of a paternalist parliamentary state has always entailed an historical determinism far more myopic than could ever be properly ascribed to Marxism. The rude shock administered by the establishment of the new right's 'market populism' as the governing ideology of the 1980s appears to have clearly and definitively shattered the complacency associated with the phrase, so oft repeated over the past century, 'we are all socialists now'. At the same time it must also be recognised that the emergence of market populism amidst the current crisis of capitalism has simultaneously exposed in its wake the impasse of working class politics in the West. The long-standing assumption that a return to mass unemployment and an abandonment of bourgeois commitment to the Keynesian welfare state would lead to political instability and a crisis of capitalist legitimacy, an assumption as common among liberals as among many Marxists, has been cast into doubt. For the moment at least, it is the weakness of the political forces associated with the working class-whether trade unions, or social democratic parties, or revolutionary socialist parties-that has come to the fore and brought home an old lesson: there is nothing automatic about the development of socialist consciousness when the capitalist economy is not generating material benefits or job security for the working class.