Social democracy - not dead yet: a response to Clive Hamilton

Health care ought be based upon universal insurance with no area of care uncovered, (including dental services, ambulance services, home nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, podiatry, chiropractic care, hearing aids, glasses, contact lenses, prostheses and surgical expenses). Quality aged care ought be established as a right due to all Australians. The labour market ought be properly regulated, rather than deregulated in the hope “the market will clear”.

Meanwhile, unemployment should be tackled through targeted industry assistance and labour market programs, expansion of public services and the harnessing of superannuation funds. Such demands form the core of a traditional social democratic program and, far from being irrelevant, could eventually garner majority support.

Another area of concern is Hamilton’s dismissal of the concept of “class” and his disdain for the goal of social ownership as an “indefensible anachronism”. He argues forcefully that “As affluence increases, class ceases to be a useful category”. This line of argument is flawed for a number of reasons. To begin with, Australia remains a heavily stratified society. According to a report from the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM), in 2002, the top 20 per cent of Australian households owned more than half the total household wealth. Meanwhile, “the poorest 20 per cent of households possessed almost nothing, while the bottom 40 per cent owned just 8 per cent of total household wealth”.

By and large, many of today’s real battlers are consigned to the outer suburbs where housing is cheap, rates are low and services, including transport, are poor. Despite Hamilton’s claim that only 20 per cent of Australians experience true poverty, there are still massive gaps in wealth and prosperity.

Furthermore, as Hamilton recognises, class refers to deep-seated structural concerns of power, not merely concerns of identity. “Structure” in this sense does not imply any lack of human agency. In Australia, the wealthiest 20 per cent of individuals “[own] almost 90 per cent of all shares”: as clear an indication as any that class remains as relevant a category now as ever.

Ownership of the means of production is still a “great divide” between the wealthy and most ordinary Australians. This division has significant consequences for any process of economic democratisation. Despite Hamilton’s claim that work no longer forms the core of most peoples’ identity - this role, instead, having been taken by consumption - work is still at the core of most people’s everyday lives, and its democratisation ought to remain a compelling goal for all social democrats and democratic socialists.

Furthermore, as workers, most of us still face not only alienation but also relations of exploitation. It may not be fashionable these days to speak of “expropriation of surplus value” for fear of being labelled an “unreconstructed Marxist”, but it can still be argued that most workers do not receive the full proceeds of their labour.

While there is no realistic “final” way out of this bind, progress could be made through a “co-operative incentive and support scheme” designed to encourage co-operative ownership through finance, advice and taxation incentives. Re-expanding the public sector would mark a reassertion of democratic control over the economy, and the capture of any surplus for social ends. Public ownership remains defensible for these reasons, and others, including the need to provide competition in oligopoly markets, to provide essential services on the basis of need, not profitability, and the need to provide first class infrastructure in areas of “natural public monopoly”.

Furthermore, while Soviet-style, bureaucratic socialism is dead - relative flexibility of capital flows is preferable to a stifling “command economy” - the same need not be said for the project of a “democratic mixed economy” where the flow of capital is itself democratised through Meidner-style wage earner funds, and where co-operative enterprises proliferate throughout the economic system.

While there remains a need for the resurrection of a radical, traditional social democratic agenda, we might nonetheless ask: is there any point expecting such a process to occur via Labor? As Hamilton justifiably argues “The fading of a substantive difference between the conservative and social democratic parties means that both are more likely to attract careerists and opportunists”.

Reform of the ALP will not be easy, but a good start would be compulsory disclosure of factional membership in elections for conference, direct election of National Conference candidates, the provision of policy speeches by all conference candidates, and all conference decisions to be taken as being binding.

In this way, ordinary party members would gain leverage over decision-making processes, opening the way for a movement for social democratic renewal from below. The ALP needs to become a party governed from the “bottom up” not from the “top down”, shifting power from the careerists to the rank and file. By empowering the ALP rank and file, what is more, there also lies the hope of mobilising them into the broader struggle led by alliances such as the “Now We the People” movement. Building a bloc of forces strong enough to secure real change remains the most urgent task confronting the broad left today.

Traditional social democracy is neither dead nor irrelevant, but in the wake of the “Third Way” and its impact on Labor thinking, has certainly found itself relegated to an unfashionable margin.

In the process of its revival, however, the social democratic movement could do worse than to heed the advice of Hamilton, moving to support a new politics that looks beyond consumption to provide the scope for developing real meaning in people’s lives. While economic growth need not be abandoned completely as a core goal, and continued productivity gains will maintain competitiveness, this should always be weighed against the social costs.

A good place to start would be by adopting a 35-hour week and extending compulsory annual leave. Rather than internalising the notion that there is no alternative to neo-liberalism and insipid Third Way politics, social democrats and democratic socialists need, now, to return to their radical roots. Only thus can they avoid the effective “liquidation” Hamilton suggests in “What’s Left? The Death of Social Democracy”.