Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated on this day in 1986. He was an internationalist and the last social-democratic leader to really believe in a world beyond capitalism.Jacobin
Several leading Democratic candidates in the 2020 US presidential race favor introducing elements of a modern welfare state in health care, childcare, and education. Whether a Democrat wins or loses in 2020, social democracy has re-emerged in American politics for the first time since the 1930s.Castañeda is curiously quiet about Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the Green New Deal. No mention of MMT either. Focuses most on Elizabeth Warren.
Human beings are more prosperous and numerous than we’ve ever been, while the Earth’s other species are dying off faster than at any time in human history.
These two conditions are related. But if the second one persists long enough, we will be following our fellow organisms into the dustbin of geological history.
This is the primary takeaway from a new United Nations report on our planet’s rapidly diminishing biodiversity.
My point here is a disquieting one. It is the case that many neoliberal ideas are plain wrong; neoliberalism, for example, might well have retarded productivity growth. It is not, however, sufficient to point this out. Neoliberal ideology – whether right or wrong – can create its own reality. Insofar as this is the case, it is a constraint upon what social democratic governments can achieve.
The point is far broader than neoliberalism or economics. A cultural mindset is determinative. Cultures with clashing cultural mindset, such as liberalism and traditionalism, exhibit social and political divisiveness. Neoliberalism is a particular interpretation of liberalism.Who controls the narrative controls the culture's perception of reality.
Regular readers will know that I have spent a lot of time writing about the demise of the Left political parties as they became subsumed with neoliberal economic ideology, which blurred the political landscape as the ‘centre’ moved to the Right. That topic was the focus of our current book – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, September 2017). The neoliberal infestation has left these parties with declining electoral support, fractured internal organisations and cultures, and a seeming inability to abandon their flawed economic narratives. But there is a mirror image to this demise and that is playing out on the conservative side of politics. In Australia in the last week (but building for years) the far right conservative elements from within the government have brought down their own leader and our Prime Minister in a spiteful clash of ideologies between the more moderate elements in their party and the extremes out on the right. The internal tensions that drove this suicidal mission is being played out around the world. Think about the way that Trump is compromising the Republican party. Think about how Brexit is splitting Tory ranks in Britain. And so on. The problem for the conservatives is that citizens are realising that the neoliberal economic approach has failed to deliver on its promises. And that economic model is ‘owned’ by the conservatives. The adoption of neoliberal economics by social democratic parties is not part of their DNA. It is largely because their ranks have been infested by careerists who have come from the ‘elites’ and have little resonance with workers. The gaps in the policy space that these fractures have created is being occupied by extremist groups. It will be much easier for progressive parties to reclaim that space than it will be for the conservatives who are in the process of a death spiral. But to do that, the social democratic movements has to abandon every vestige of neoliberal economics – the concepts, policies and language and framing. That is the challenge.Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Seventy percent of Americans said they support a single-payer or Medicare for All health insurance system — including 85 percent of registered Democrats and 52 percent of registered Republicans. Compare these numbers to 2014, when only 21 percent of Americans thought we should have a single-payer system.
The number of Americans who want to eliminate the private insurance industry and replace it with a single universal public program has more than tripled in just four years.…
Similarly, according to the Reuters poll, 79 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans say they support tuition-free college, amounting to 60 percent overall. It’s hard to find earlier polling data on this subject because it wasn’t even a widely discussed political topic prior to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign — despite the fact that college tuition has more than doubled in the last 30 years, and the student debt crisis has consequently spiraled out of control.
Sanders’s campaign put the idea on the map. Hillary Clinton responded to this pressure from her left by drafting a watered-down version of Bernie’s universal proposal. But the cat was out of the bag, despite establishment Democrats’ best efforts to shove it back in. Now a majority of Americans believe that we should have free public education....Jacobin
How has a country of under five million people become a world leader in developing holistic policies that promote democratic, sustainable, and inclusive economic growth? The answer lies in its people's belief that focusing on the welfare of all citizens not only enhances wellbeing, but also increases productivity.Project Syndicate
So, I’ve changed the description of this blog’s perspective to socialist. I haven’t however, adopted the formulation “democratic socialist” which was used, in the 20th century, to emphasise a rejection of the Stalinist claim to have produced “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. That’s no longer necessary.
As has been true for most of the history of the modern world, the only serious threat to democracy is now coming from the right. So, it’s important to defend democracy as well as advancing the case for socialism.John Quiggin's Blog
Collapse of center left risks destabilizing Continent’s politics.Neoliberalism takes over. Center left folds. Populism rises. Outcome unclear.
Data show rising dissatisfaction with economic status quo.The millennial generation is the largest demographically, and it is poised to begin taking over power as the boomers start fading.
Soft neoliberalism has exhausted its appeal. The best progressive alternative is an explicit embrace of socialism
As it is used today, the term socialism does not reflect a well-worked ideology. Rather it conveys an attitude that could be described as “unapologetic social democracy” or, in the US context, “liberalism with a spine”. It’s expressed in support for proposals that break with the cautious incrementalism of the past, and are in some cases frankly utopian: universal basic income, free post-school education, large increases in minimum wages, and so on.
That’s important, but a real alternative needs more than attitude and a grab-bag of policy ideas. After decades in which the focus has been on critiquing neoliberalism, the task of thinking about positive alternatives is urgent, but efforts in this direction are only just beginning....
To develop a serious socialist alternative, we need both to look backwards to the social democratic moment of the 50s and 60s, and forwards to the prospects for a genuine sharing economy based on the internet and other technological advances.…
The success of Keynesian stimulus in the immediate aftermath of the GFC and the disastrous outcomes from the shift to austerity after 2010 show that Keynesian economic management is as vital as ever. Going beyond crisis management, socialist governments would reinstate the commitment to full employment, and solidify it through policies such as a jobs guarantee, ensuring the availability of a full-time job for anyone who has been unemployed for some minimum period....
The success of Keynesian stimulus in the immediate aftermath of the GFC and the disastrous outcomes from the shift to austerity after 2010 show that Keynesian economic management is as vital as ever. Going beyond crisis management, socialist governments would reinstate the commitment to full employment, and solidify it through policies such as a jobs guarantee, ensuring the availability of a full-time job for anyone who has been unemployed for some minimum period.
However, the technological and social changes that have taken place over the past 60 years mean that the traditional notion of full employment, focused on full-time jobs for male breadwinners, is no longer adequate. We need a more flexible approach, accommodating the more diverse patterns of life and work of the 21st century.
In this context, the idea of a universal basic income set at a level comparable to the age pension has considerable appeal. The ultimate goal would be to provide an unconditional payment lower than the return from working but sufficient to sustain decent living standards. An interim step, proposed by the late Tony Atkinson in his final book, Inequality: What Can Be Done?, would be a participation income available to people who undertook voluntary work to benefit the community.
The combination of a job guarantee and a universal basic income would free workers from dependence on employers. But this would only be feasible if society could ensure adequate production of crucial goods and services, without dependence on the wishes of big business....
The idea of a socialist economy with unconditional access to basic incomes and greatly expanded provision of free services might seem utopian. But in the aftermath of neoliberal failure, utopian vision is what is needed. To re-engage people with democratic politics, we need to move beyond culture wars and arguments over marginal adjustments to tax rates and budget allocations, necessary as these may be in the short term...
After Trump announced the existence of the alt-left on live TV, media outlets scurried to tell the world exactly where the term emerged from. CBS explains that it “came out of the conservative media.” CNN, quoting a director at the Anti-Defamation League, describes it as a “made-up term used by people on the right.” Heavy.com writes that “the term ‘alt-left’ began being used by the online conservative media in 2016 before it slowly migrated to more mainstream conservative voices, like Fox News’ Sean Hannity.” (Hannity, who repeatedly uses the term on his TV show, seems to be getting widespread credit.) The British Telegraph newspaper, meanwhile, flatters the president with a power of logodaedaly he definitely doesn’t have, claiming the phrase was “coined by Mr Trump” himself.
None of these explanations is really true. The term “alt-left” was probably simultaneously invented hundreds or thousands of times, always bearing a slightly different meaning depending on its inventor. But up until now, the people who most forcefully pushed the idea of an alt-left weren’t Nazis or 4chan posters or anyone else in the orbit of Trump and pro-Trump Republicans trying to invent a mythical opposite to the alt-right. The alt-left is, first and foremost, a figment of centrist Democrats....
The invention of the alt-left allowed centrist liberals to pretend that something entirely different was going on: They were sandwiched between two sets of frothing fanatics who secretly had a lot in common with each other. It established their particular brand of liberalism, possibly encompassing a few “moderate Republicans,” as the only reasonable ground, besieged by alts....Politico
“If we want to ensure more people are well-employed, central banks alone will certainly not suffice” is a quote I am happy to republish because I consider it to be 100 per cent accurate. The only problem is that the way I think about that statement and construct its implications is totally at odds with the intent of its author, who claimed it was “an important lesson of Friedman’s speech”, which “remains valid”. The quote appeared in a recent Bloomberg article (July 17, 2017) – What Milton Friedman Got Right, and Wrong, 50 Years Ago – written by journalist Ferdinando Giugliano. It celebrates the Presidential Speech that Friedman gave to the American Economic Association on December 29, 1967 at their annual conference in Washington D.C. In terms of the contest of paradigms, the speech is considered to be the starting point proper of the Monetarist era, even though it took at least another 5 or 6 years (with the onset of the OPEC oil crises) for the gospel espoused by Friedman to really gain ground. The problem is that Friedman was selling snake oil that became the popular litany of the faithful because it suited those who wanted to degrade the role of government in maintaining full employment. It was in step with the push by capital to derail the Post War social democratic consensus that had seen real wages growing in proportion with productivity, reduced income inequality, jobs for all who wanted to work and a strong sense of collective solidarity emerge in most advanced nations. This consensus was the anathema of the elites who saw it as squeezing their share of national income and giving too much power to workers to negotiate better terms and conditions in their work places. Friedman provided the smokescreen for hacking into that consensus and so began the neo-liberal era. We are still enduring its destructive consequences.
Friedman’s speech was subsequently published in the American Economic Review as ‘The Role of Monetary Policy’ in the 1968 volume 58(1) (pages 1-17).
The Bloomberg article goes along with the view that Friedman’s speech represented a “paradigm shift” in economics....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Here is Part 3 of my series on the book Trumponomics – Causes and Consequences. As it is an early assessment of the economics of the Trump presidency, concrete left policy alternatives do not take up much of the content, but there are some ideas to draw on.
Central to the aim of making the left ‘great again’, to quote one of the authors, is a political programme which pivots away from the dominant liberal, politically correct agenda, and which serves the interests of the masses.
This would be a social democratic platform, offering a radical alternative to the neoliberal ideology which has captured both major parties in the US....The Political Economy of Development
What would it take for the parties of the left to embrace the pro-working class [social democratic] policies described here? And is the underlying suspicion voiced by Rothstein above actually correct: that the Democratic Party is so beholden to large corporate interests that it is incapable of adopting these kinds of platforms?
This article has two main purposes. The first purpose is to introduce a new economic framework under which Sri Lanka could break down the chains that have kept them in poverty and become one of the “First World” or “Developed” nations.
The second purpose is to model Sri Lanka after the Scandinavian nations where the very wealthy live in safety, security and peacefully alongside the rest of the population enjoying all minimum basic needs and not like in some developed nations where a sizable population lives in poverty while a few enjoy unspeakable luxury and wealth, living in guarded communities. In Scandinavian nations everyone has free healthcare, free education, a house to live and livable wages and retirement income to live comfortably when they retire. These are some of the benefits we can experience if Sri Lanka became a First World nation following the footsteps of Scandinavian nations. Compare the lives of Scandinavian citizens with the Sri Lankan citizens; currently a huge segment of Sri Lankan women work outside Sri Lanka as domestic servants, often harassed by their employers....
It is always a puzzle why a nation like Sri Lanka is poor when the people are smart, work hard and quite honest. We tried to come up with a few responses to this question but I could never really understand the real reason until I came across, as I believe, are not only extremely smart but also benevolent, group of economists, other professional and business people that go by the “Modern Money Theory” (MMT) group. Their theory is so perfect for Sri Lanka that when I first came across it, I could not believe it, but as I read books written by the members of the MMT group and began interacting with them I realised that MMT can uplift a nation such as Sri Lanka from a developing nation to a developed nation status. If Sri Lanka is willing to consider the MMT approach to economics the founders and the members of the MMT framework would be ready to help Sri Lanka understand their framework in detail and help Sri Lanka adopt it without having to worry about any ill-consequences of inflation when spending the own currency of a sovereign nation. Therefore, let me introduce the MMT framework and the people behind it to Sri Lankans....OMG moment.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a political history, overview and critical evaluation of the social democratic tradition in Western politics with some reference to the Canadian experience. It serves as a starting point for the Broadbent Institute’s new initiative exploring social democratic renewal in Canada, a project that will feature essays from a wide range of left perspectives on the future of social democracy in this critical moment of upheaval, inequality and erosion in democracies around the globe.Broadbent Institute
Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg (“The Nobel factor: the prize in economics, social democracy and the market turn”) look at the strange death of social democracy at the hands of market liberalism. That death was accelerated by the role of the Nobel prize in economics that conferred to economics an allure of science and that was used to much greater profit by neoliberal economists to push for their version of economic policies.The difference between social democracy and market liberalism can be summarized as a difference in approach.
Offer and Söderberg define social democracy as a continuation of Enlightenment: from equality before God to equality before law, to equality between men and women and races, to equality of entitlements between citizens. Since each citizen goes through periods of dependency (as a child, as a mother, as unemployed, or as an old person) when he/she cannot earn an income, he has to depend on transfers from the working age population. This life-cycle pattern is shared by all, and thus society, in a form of social insurance, sets a system that provides redistribution from the earners to the dependents.
How does market liberalism solves the life-cycle problem? By positing that everyone is a free agent with his endowments of capital and labor. When he cannot work, he uses the proceeds from his capital (assuming of course that he originally either inherited or saved enough wealth to have a capital). It is not a “society” in a true sense of the word, but a group of “agents” who manage own income over the life-cycle. Since returns are to one’s ownership of labor and capital and there is no redistribution, it is a “just world” society where one gets back what he has put in, and where income inequality is never an issue—precisely because income is exactly proportional to one’s contributions.
These are indeed two different views of the world. As Offer and Söderberg write, social democratic view was extremely successful empirically but was not theoretically worked out much by economists. The neoliberal view has exactly the reverse characteristics: empirically it was not much of a success (look at private pension schemes in Chile), but economists have extensively worked on it theoretically…
These, and perhaps a few other, elements seem to me to imply that a return to the Golden Age of social democracy is unlikely to happen. On the other hand, there is a realization of inadequacy of the neoliberal model that bequeathed a huge crisis (which did not turn into another Great Depression precisely because the key rules of neoliberalism were abandoned in order to save the system). As many times in history, we are now at the point where neither of the two established doctrines seems to provide reasonable answers to today’s issues. That leaves the field open to new thinking and experimentation.Global Inequality
In today's global economy, neoliberalism reigns supreme, organized labor is in deep retreat and public debt has shot through the roof. In the face of these crises, is a global 21st century remaking of the 1930s-era New Deal what people on the left should be fighting for?The New Deal was a co-optation scheme to save capitalism rather than to reform or replace it. What's needed is a new economic model that empowers the people rather than privileging property owners under the bourgeois liberalism that arose as nascent capitalism replaced late-stage feudalism and which is now institutionalized through neoclassical economics as the foundation of neoliberalism.
Contemporary progressive parties, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, have rallied around the idea of a "new New Deal," while the European Citizen's Initiative for a "New Deal 4 Europe" appears to have the backing of both Labor and Green party leaders in several European countries. In the US, Bernie Sanders has also been a strong advocate of this idea as the way out of our troubles.
However, a closer look at the history of the 1930s-era New Deal reveals that a new New Deal would do little to solve the underlying problems of capitalism and could even delay efforts to combat climate change through its emphasis on boosting growth via a new era of state capitalism.
Although New Deal-style programs have the potential to alleviate poverty in the short term, they are deeply limited by the core constraint that the raison d'être of active state intervention in a capitalist regime is none other than to save capitalism. Moreover, any program in the mold of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal would also be limited by its failure to give workers a greater say in decision-making.
For me, EU referendum raised a question which nobody has so far asked, namely: if there was a case for a referendum, isn’t there a far stronger case for worker democracy?
Many of us were appalled by the atrocious standard of debate in the referendum. Robert Harris called the episode “the most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event of my lifetime.” Perhaps Thatcher and Attlee were right: referendums are a “device of dictators and demagogues.”
Which brings me to the question. If you think the referendum was a good idea, you must surely think worker democracy is a far better one. I say so for three reasons:Worker democracy would be either social democracy or democratic socialism, with government of, by and for the people.
