What should the left propose?
| Author | Unger, Roberto Mangabeira |
| Position | Essays - Essay |
What Should the Left Propose?is a proposal to change the world, and each part of it, right now, through a series of next steps that would carry forward the historical programme of the left. It would carry that programme forward by reinventing it. Although this argument reaches out to the whole world, it has special meaning for Europe.
European social democracy has represented, in the eyes of much of mankind, an alternative to the model of social and economic life represented by the USA. This alternative has continued to exercise immense attraction even as it has been increasingly emptied of its distinctive content on its European home ground. It is in the interest of all humanity as well as of Europe that the European nations continue to embody for the whole world the image of a different way. They are ceasing to do so.
European social democracy has retreated to the last-ditch defence of a high level of social entitlements, giving up one by one many of its most distinctive traits, both good and bad. The ideologists of this retreat have tried to disguise it as a synthesis between European-style social protection and American-style economic flexibility.
There are now two European lefts. One of these lefts accepts this retreat, with alacrity or with resignation. The other left tries to slow it down, with little hope of reversing it. These two bodies of opinion are adversaries but they are also allies, complicit in the same costly and unnecessary diminishment of the historical ambitions of the left. Europe needs another left.
It is a left that will not be able to accomplish its task within the limits of the institutional and ideological settlement that came to define social democracy in the course of the twentieth century. The cornerstone of that settlement was abandonment of the attempt to reshape politics and production in exchange for a strong power to moderate inequality and insecurity through social rights and redistributive policies. European social democracy is faced with problems that cannot be solved within the limits of this settlement.
There is the need to base both economic growth and social inclusion on broader access to the advanced practices and sectors of production. Without such broader access, economic growth and social inclusion must continue to rest on compensatory measures. These measures provide an insufficient antidote to the deep inequalities and exclusions resulting from the division between the more advanced and the more backward parts of each national economy.
There is the need to establish social solidarity on the base of real responsibility of people to care for one another beyond the boundaries of the family. Without such direct connection, social solidarity must continue to depend on the inadequate cement of money transfers.
There is the need to give ordinary men and women a better chance to live larger lives, and not to require war as the terrible device by which they can be lifted above 'the long littleness of life'. Without such a chance, peace will continue to bring stupefaction and belittlement.
Even the part of the work of European social democracy that can begin to be carried out within the limits of established institutions cannot be completed within those limits. Two such undertakings for the European left would serve as bridges between what needs to be done now and what should be done next--the effort to deal with the problems enumerated in the preceding paragraphs.
The first such bridge is the reorientation of economic policy. Vulgar Keynesianism is not the answer today--if it ever was--to the pseudo-orthodoxy that now dominates European public...
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