{"id":8252,"date":"2009-09-30T22:34:04","date_gmt":"2009-09-30T12:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=8252"},"modified":"2009-09-30T22:34:22","modified_gmt":"2009-09-30T12:34:22","slug":"social-cough-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=8252","title":{"rendered":"Social *cough* democracy…"},"content":{"rendered":"

The intellectual challenge for social democrats is not just to repudiate the neo-liberal extremism that has landed us in this mess, but to advance the case that the social-democratic state offers the best guarantee of preserving the productive capacity of properly regulated competitive markets, while ensuring that government is the regulator, that government is the funder or provider of public goods and that government offsets the inevitable inequalities of the market with a commitment to fairness for all. Social democracy\u2019s continuing philosophical claim to political legitimacy is its capacity to balance the private and the public, profit and wages, the market and the state. That philosophy once again speaks with clarity and cogency to the challenges of our time.<\/p>\n

Social-democratic governments across the world must rise to the further challenge of developing a practical policy response to the crisis that rebuilds shattered economic growth, while also devising a new regulatory regime for the financial markets of the future. This is our immediate challenge. But if we fail, there is a grave danger that new political voices of the extreme Left and the nationalist Right will begin to achieve a legitimacy hitherto denied them. Again, history is replete with the most disturbing of precedents.<\/p>\n

~ KRudd, ‘The Global Financial Crisis’, The Monthly<\/em>, February 2009, p.21.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Originally, in the late nineteenth century, an ostensibly revolutionary doctrine — a marriage, presided over by Marxism, of the industrial working class and the middle class intelligentsia — in Australia, ‘social democracy’ is the ideological blanket in which the ‘Australian Labor Party’ has wrapped itself for many years. As an instrument through which the aspiring middle class can obtain some degree of influence over the political process, the party has been relatively successful. But over previous decades keeping the coal-powered fluorescent bulb burning on that hill in Canberra — and various State parliaments — has rendered the party a lifeless husk: somewhat dependent on the million-dollar sponsorship of the ALP-dominated cash-cows otherwise known as ‘trade unions’; increasingly reliant on the corporate sector for the filthy lucre necessary to defeat the Tories come election time; and almost entirely bereft of ideas.<\/p>\n