Chris Dillow | “Values” and the crisis of social democracy
Phillip Collins in the Times (£) reminds me why I’m a Marxist rather than a social democrat. He mocks Ed Miliband’s claim that Britain has been run by people with the “wrong values” as being “the dying breath of vintage social democracy.”
What Philip doesn’t do, though, is show why Miliband is so wrong.
To do this, let’s concede his factual premise – that bosses have had the “wrong values”. How can this be so?
Miliband seems to suggest that it might be just bad luck.
Nonsense.
What he misses is that selection effects and incentives serve to generate the “wrong values” at the top. I mean this in four ways:
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October 1, 2011 1:13 pm
Are the terms Marxist and social democracy totally incompatible?
Eamon Gilmore did the same in his speech a few weeks ago. Either he is so arrogant to believe he has anything to offer without the welfare state or he’s been so institutionalised in “democracy incorporated” in the merry-go-round of polls and focus groups, that he actually believes the “old manuals” are of no value.
The welfare state was the foundation block of social democracy and try as these middle class wankers might to erradicate it and claim to be building a “new” social democracy for the 21st neoliberal century, it’s all just spin.
October 1, 2011 9:30 pm
“Are the terms Marxist and social democracy totally incompatible?”
I don’t know — in part because I don’t know enough about Marx and in part because I think both terms have a degree of flexibility that it would be impossible to give a definitive answer. My reason for linking to Chris Dillow’s post is the four ways he lists after the opening that I did quote, rather than the opening itself.