The Library and the Workshop: Social Democracy and Capitalism in the Knowledge Age - Hardcover

Andersson, Jenny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804762635 ISBN 13: 9780804762632

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

This book offers a detailed account of the way that social democracy today makes sense of capitalism. In particular, it challenges the idea that social democracy has gone "neoliberal," arguing that so-called Third Way policies seem to have brought out new aspects of a thoroughgoing social interventionism with roots deep in the history of social democracy. Author Jenny Andersson expertly develops the claim that what distinguishes today's social democracy from the past is the way that it equates cultural and social values with economic values, which in turn places a premium on individuals who are capable of succeeding in the knowledge economy. Offering an insightful study of Britain's New Labour and Sweden's SAP, and of the political cultural transformations that have taken place in those countries, this is the first book that looks seriously into how the economic, social, and cultural policies of contemporary social democracy fit together to form a particular understanding of capitalism and capitalist politics.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jenny Andersson is a researcher at the Centre d'études et des recherches internationales, Institut de sciences politiques, Paris. She is the author of Between Growth and Security: Swedish Social Democracy From a Strong Society to a Third Way (2007).

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The Library and the Workshop

Social Democracy and Capitalism in the Knowledge AgeBy Jenny Andersson

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6263-2

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................viiIntroduction................................................................11 Dilemmas of Social Democracy.............................................72 The Political Economy of Knowledge.......................................243 Defining Old and New Times: Origins of the Third Way.....................434 Capitalism?..............................................................625 Politics of Growth.......................................................796 Knowledge Societies......................................................977 Investing in People......................................................1178 Creating the Knowledge Individual........................................1339 The Future of Social Democracy: Epilogue.................................148Notes.......................................................................161Index.......................................................................195

Chapter One

Dilemmas of Social Democracy

The History of Social Democracy

Any history of social democracy is inevitably the history of its context. Social democracy is a political movement umbilically linked to capitalism and modernity, dependent on these forces for its very existence. Just as it once grappled with questions of industrial modernity, it continues to grapple with the issues and dilemmas posed by (post)industrial modernity.

The relationship between social democracy and its surrounding context-the field on which it operates, the parameters that it takes as given or changeable-is, however, far from simple. Historically, social democracy has built its platform around the idea of progress, around interpreting modernity, defining it, indeed, representing modern times and carrying the future. From its birth somewhere between the French and the Industrial Revolutions, it recognized capitalism as a force capable of bringing about that modernity. It saw its own role as that of the catalyst. The fundamental paradox of social democracy is that the recognition of capitalism as the fundamental means to social progress brings about the recognition of capitalism itself. There is an important but rather fine line between socialism and capitalism in the history of social democracy.

Social democracy, then, is not a social movement that is simply adapting to new orders of production. It is intimately involved in bringing them about. It is not possible to separate the economy as an objective sphere from our understanding and interpretation of it and from the way that historical agents intervene into it, thus creating in the process the boundaries between the economic and the social or the cultural. The making sense of new times is also creating them, through discourse and ideology and through policy and institutions. Here, the notion of the knowledge society fulfils a similar function for the Third Way that the notion of the industrial society did for nascent social democracy in the 1880s or that the idea of the affluent society did for social democratic revisionists in the 1950s. As Bob Jessop suggests, the idea of a knowledge-based economy has emerged in the post-Fordist world as a pervasive metanarrative, the function of which is not just interpretative but constitutive of the new economy because it motivates modes and means of governance designed to bring it about. Just as social democracy was a central historical agent behind the bringing about of industrial modernity, the Third Way with its notion of the new economy is a key agent in creating knowledge capitalism.

The relationship between interpretation and construction is one of the fundamental dilemmas of social democracy, following its ambiguous relationship with capitalism. Social democracy has not, in history, been primarily concerned with the overthrow of capitalism and hence with the radical alternative. Rather, it is a social movement firmly caught between its radical critique of capitalism and its emphasis on the gradual improvement of capitalism. These two seemingly irreconcilable political strategies are not irreconcilable in the history of social democracy. Rather its history is the history of trying to marry utopian critique and pragmatic stances in its various bouts of revisionism. In the history of social democracy, modernization discourse is about such attempts at reconciliation. In the late nineteenth century, social democracy broke away from utopian socialism by presenting itself as the practical alternative. With the rise of reformism in the interwar period, it replaced notions of revolution with an appeal to nation and prosperity. In the 1950s, it took a further step down the revisionist road when it focused on the efficient management of affluence. Nevertheless, utopian critique and discourses of improvement are distinct political and discursive strategies, leading in different directions, with the former calling for radical alternatives and another future and the latter leading to political compromise and the wish to bring about efficiency and prosperity within the framework of the market economy. The tension between utopian critique and discourses of pragmatic improvement is a fundamental dilemma of social democracy.

This has important implications for the substantial discussion in the literature on how to define the "new" social democracy in relation to what "old" social democracy was. There are two problems here. The first one is the construction of radical newness, break, and discontinuity, which has characterized much of the political and academic writing on contemporary social democracy. In particular, the literature about New Labour saw this newness in its abdication of socialism in favor of market capitalism or even neoliberalism. This has set in place a dichotomy between old and new, which is not very helpful for understanding the complex origins and trajectories of social democracy either historically or in the present. It is clearly not possible, from any reading of social democracy's history, to argue that the Third Way's embracing of the market signifies a decisive break with old social democracy because social democracy has always grappled with questions of markets and capitalist efficiency. On the other hand, suggestions that the Third Way stands in continuity with "old" social democracy have often been simplistic. Studies of ideological change have often led to accounts of the evolutionary nature of social democratic ideology, where revisionism becomes a kind of learning process, an unproblematic adaptation to altered socioeconomic circumstances. From this perspective, the Third Way tends to become equated with previous periods of revisionism as if social democratic ideology evolved in a historical continuity of revisionism and ideological change was an unproblematic question of adaptation to altered socioeconomic circumstances. From this perspective, the meaning of modernization in each period in the history of social democracy is not problematized, and the Third Way becomes "a further step towards the reassessment of issues which leftwing parties have long been confronted with and addressed."

In a recent study, Sheri Berman suggests that the historic project of social democracy was its marrying of capitalism and democracy and that the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804762635
• ISBN 13: 9780804762632
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande