Socialism and Democracy

ISSN: 0885-4300 (Print) 1745-2635 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csad20

What's Left of the Left: Democrats and Social

Democrats in Challenging Times

Steve McGiffen

To cite this article: Steve McGiffen (2012) What's Left of the Left: Democrats and
Social Democrats in Challenging Times, Socialism and Democracy, 26:3, 193-196, DOI:
10.1080/08854300.2012.724900

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2012.724900

Published online: 22 Nov 2012.

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 Book Reviews 193

omnipotent and omniscient conductor set over against musicians func-

tioning as mere automatons performing their assigned tasks with the
regularity of a machine (24).
In his closing remarks (186), Lebowitz insists that he does not deny
the importance of leadership; his purpose was to explain a particular
historical phenomenon. He has provided a valuable framework for
doing so. But he also encourages us to draw the lessons from it.
What he has demonstrated has been the dynamic of a particular van-
guard. This is the agent to which he attributed an intermediary role
between what had hitherto been mostly seen as just two primary pro-
tagonists. By analyzing the vanguards declining trajectory, Lebowitz
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has provided an object lesson in revolutionary pitfalls. But in ascribing

a logic to this vanguard a logic as inherent to it as the logics of
capital and labor are to them he has given an impression of inevit-
ability to its conduct.
Perhaps a differently conceived and more permeable vanguard
one attuned to the Marx/Lebowitz vision of a society of associated
producers could act differently.

# 2012, Victor Wallis

Department of Liberal Arts
Berklee College of Music, Boston
zendive@aol.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2012.724902

James Cronin, George Ross, and James Shoch, eds., Whats Left of the
Left: Democrats and Social Democrats in Challenging Times (Durham,
NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011)

Right at the beginning of this collection of essays, the editors in

their introduction describe the social democracy that I remember
from my own youth in the England of the 1970s, a period which they
note is seen by many nostalgically as a golden age. The many to
which they refer most definitely include this reviewer, who, despite
his working-class childhood and what for many years were rather
patchy grades, left full-time education after almost 20 years with a
PhD, a teaching qualification, and not a penny in debts.
Talking about developments over a half-century earlier, the
authors description of social democrats as people who believed that
leftists had to settle in for the long haul by building and deepening
 194 Socialism and Democracy

a democracy which would eventually empower the people to demand

changes to humanize harsh market societies is how many mainstream
Labourites of 1970s Britain saw themselves. Socialists, real socialists
like the young Steve McGiffen, wanted revolutionary change, of
course. The reformists of the Labour Party wanted, in the words of
one of the many popular satires on the partys song, The Red Flag, to
change the system bit by bit, so nobody will notice it. Of course,
we doubted whether they really wanted change at all, but that was
at least what they claimed.
Despite the cynical views of people to the left of it (and not a few on
the left of it), Labours achievements are what enabled me to get a good,
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for the most part free education up to doctoral level, free health care,
benefits when I was out of work, a living wage when I was in it, and
so on. Western Europe in the 1970s, including Britain, was one of
humanitys great achievements, and it was social democracy that
could claim the credit.
Forty years on and though I continue to see myself as a revolution-
ary, I would accept what I was told by many older, more moderate
socialists back then: the world is a complicated place, and achieving
socialism within this complicated world is an extremely complicated
problem, one which may admit of a wide variety of solutions. Yet
that is now far away from the message of the movements which
have descended from social democracy, an ideology which no longer
characterises what is known as the centre-left. And this is where
my problems begin when I come to consider this book, whose
editors believe that (t)he idea of transcending capitalism and creating
socialism has completely disappeared.
To be fair, the breathtaking arrogance and sheer ignorance of this
statement does not do justice to all of the essays which follow it. Never-
theless, the title is absolutely misleading. This book isnt about the left
at all. I am, I hope, not being purist. You dont, in my view, have to be a
revolutionary socialist to be on the left. Surely, however, the word left
has long been associated with a programme based on at least a degree
of social ownership? Reformist, radical, or revolutionary, I would
allow them all, in their huge variety, into the left tent. But people
who will not merely allow, but enthusiastically support the entry of
the market into health care, the privatisation of post offices and
public transport systems, who are now going along with the vicious
austerity policies being inflicted on Europes peoples what have
these market liberals to do with the left?
What we have instead of a real answer to the question posed in the
title is the sad story, in a number of essays by a variety of authors, of
 Book Reviews 195

how the centre-left, as it calls itself, came to embrace neoliberalism. For

while the mainstream of the labour movement has rarely espoused a
revolutionary programme, it provided until quite recently a bedrock
of alternative ideas upon which challenges to the ideology of individu-
alism could be constructed: co-operation in some countries and
regions, Christian socialism in others, a solidarity-based tradition of
trade unionism, class consciousness, communitarianism and simply
helping each other through. It is the heaping of scorn on such values
for which the modern centre-left must bear a heavy responsibility.
Nothing of that in this book, though some of the essays are useful
for their empirical content and for the sketch they provide not of the
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decline of socialism, but of the disappearance of a distinctively pro-

gressive reformism which based itself on the needs of working
people. In this respect, the editors are correct to identify the disappear-
ance of the Soviet Union and the difficulties presented by globalisa-
tion as crucial. But the gangster capitalism which replaced the
Soviet system, the direction which globalisation has taken, and the
complicit role played in that by the centre-left, have been a matter of
political decisions, decisions to which there were and are always
alternatives. The real left, in places as different as the Netherlands
and Venezuela, Norway and Bolivia, continues to demonstrate that
this is the case. The centre-left, instead of participating in the resistance
to neoliberalism, became its enthusiastic champions.
As I reject virtually all of the books premises, it is difficult for me to
comment constructively on individual chapters, which largely share
them. According to the editors, Thatcher undid much of Old
Labours postwar heritage of a vast, inefficient public sector. This is
propaganda, not history. Thatcher stole the peoples hard-won prop-
erty, and created a vast, inefficient market-based empire of thieves
and charlatans. Tell any commuter or regular train user that Britains
railway system is efficient and they will wait for the follow-up
punchline. And despite the constantly-repeated lies about National
Health Service bureaucracy, every independent study of the NHS
has confirmed that it spends relatively little on managerial staff.
The descendants of the centre-left, such as Tony Blair and Gerhard
Schroeder, whose bogus 1999 call for a third way in politics is quoted
by Jane Jenson in her chapter on European Centre-Left Parties and
New Social Risks, invariably refer to the welfare state as a safety
net, a view common in the United States. Yet this is not at all how
social democracy viewed the welfare state when it was under construc-
tion, or in its heyday. The safety net of non-contributory benefits and
emergency services for those in distress is merely one element of
 196 Socialism and Democracy

what is demonstrably the most efficient way to organise a prosperous

society where capitalist relations of production characterise the econ-
omic system.
On an empirical level the chapters on individual countries will be
of use to students of the modern history, sociology, political economy
and political systems of the countries with which they deal, which
include the Nordic states, the UK and France. These are as good as
the book gets, which isnt all that good. The chapter by George Ross
on European Centre-Lefts and the Maze of European Integration
has some value, but this is largely undermined by the fact that,
despite having been published in 2011, it fails to deal with the
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current Euro-shambles.
A real book on whats left of the left would be a worthwhile exer-
cise, even if, like this volume, it confined itself to Europe and North
America. Such diverse Communist, post-Communist and left socialist
parties as AKEL in Cyprus, Greeces Syriza, the Icelandic Left-Green
Movement, Denmarks Enhedlisten/Red-Green Alliance and the
Socialist Party of the Netherlands (SP) are interesting subjects for
study. None of these parties would accept the books assumption
that there is no alternative to capitalism, and each has solid electoral
support. Indeed, as I write, just under a month before the Dutch
general election, the SP is topping the polls, with one voter in four
stating his or her intention to opt for a party which was, until 2006,
on the fringes of electoral politics. Beyond parliaments, moreover,
new movements are arising Occupy being the best known in the
English-speaking world based on an understanding that far from
being the only viable system, capitalism isnt viable at all. In fact, its
destroying the planet, and there is no way to reform it so that it func-
tions without doing so.
That is a problem for all of us. There is no chance of whats left of
the centre-left, which is a major part of this problem, becoming part of
its solution. The best we can hope for is that those honest progressives
who somehow cling to their faith that it can be restored to its original
purpose will wake up and smell the results of the planetary destruction
in which they are complicit.

# 2012 Steve McGiffen

Editor, spectrezine.org
Associate Professor of International Relations,
American Graduate School in Paris
spmcgiffen@yahoo.co.uk
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2012.724900