SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND ITS CRITICS: THE CASE OF ENGLAND

...It is not, we discover, the "failure" of social democracy that upsets the English contributors to this volume at all...

...What makes that an attractive prospect must be left to these authors to explain in some future symposium...

...He doesn't explain how this power differs essentially from that of business and farm monopolies to withhold products from the market until the offered price is "competitive...

...But that is because with two exceptions they behave as ideologues, not social scientists, dedicated to helping the editor prevent the coming of "the institutions of British social democracy to these shores...

...a cultural bias against certain kinds of work, the excessive export of both financial and human capital during the imperialist period, a general social conservatism and comparatively strong classconsciousness, an aversion to practicing the arts of modern salesmanship, all of which (and no doubt many other causes as well) have helped to produce an industrial sector that has become less and less internationally competitive in the course of this century...

...It will also, if they have their way, continue to be the advanced capitalist society in which the average person, white or (especially) black, has the best chance of being born poor, of staying poor, of receiving inadequate or no medical care, of dying in an industrial accident, of being excluded from participation in the management of one's workplace, or of being cast on the scrap heap by an ailing corporation without any attempt being made by anyone to nourish and reward his or her potential productivity...

...Owners and managers of capital possess resources or skills that are carefully kept in short supply among a limited group of people...

...By contrast, Leslie Lenkowski's scholarly description of the welfare state in Britain simply falsifies the stated views of the editor, although the latter seems not to have noted this fact...

...But on close inspection of his and the other essays in this volume, one begins to think that "authoritarian and paternalist regimes" are precisely what these Englishmen long for— regimes that will put labor unions in their place, and undo a century's damage of painfully achieved liberal democracy...

...These are, in short, societies that are trying to be vaguely socialist and egalitarian without abolishing the basic institutions of capitalism ("private" control of the means of production, and hierarchically structured market incentives to work...

...But it will still be the case as it always has been that if an American shops at Harrods, or eats at the Connaught Grill, or goes to see the American Ballet Theatre (sitting next to a man in a custom-tailored suit who might be Peter Jay or Peregrine Worsthorne and is volubly complaining about trade-union thugs during intermission), or is living in a house that is for sale in one of the better neighborhoods of North London, he will encounter a multitude of Englishmen and women who seem to be able to afford these relatively high-priced luxuries quite nicely, not to mention the relatively leisurely life that enjoyment of such luxuries implies...

...Cosgrave cannot forgive them for is that they willingly participate in the management of economies that despite constant "intrusions" from the state and the general current decline of Western European capitalism are still two to three times as productive as Great Britain's...

...The picture that one finally begins to see (from an aggressively modernist and Americanist perspective, of course) is that of a very class-conscious society, in which the prerogatives and traditions of the past are jealously guarded...

...A look at the history books and the data collections confirms this impression, moreover: Great Britain has been falling steadily behind the rest of the industrialized world throughout the 20th century...

...One remembers that George Dangerfield wrote a book about the Edwardian period entitled The Strange Death of Liberal England...

...Moreover, their 337 situation as a class is never deeply painful or questionable, so that again they usually appear not as instigators of class conflict but only as hardheadedly rational economic actors: business monopolists or oligopolists are rarely seen wilfully to "hold society to ransom" as a group...

...Lenkowski's summary is that the British welfare state has had a slight redistributive effect, and that "to the extent that [it] has promoted equality, it has done so by leveling up, rather than down...

...Neoconservatives heartily endorse this division of labor and then vent their fury or scorn on its victims...

...Thus the overall dynamic of the domestic economy seems to emphasize keeping things roughly the same, rather than changing and increasing them: Britain is a low-growth, lowproductivity society, and clearly has been for a long time...

...However difficult it may be to break with the consensus of the postwar years, this must be done if the British Conservative Party is not to go the way of its Scandinavian counterparts, reduced to impotent rumps following their pragmatic adoption of the nostra of socialism...

...Comparisons that seem to favor the latter are usually between middleaged workers and young professionals...

...The attack on organized labor remains an antidemocratic attack on fitful signs of the coming to equal power of what has long been a political underclass in Britain...

...According to Brittan, "union monopolies differ in an important way from other organized groups," in that only they "will normally withdraw output from the market until representatives of the public sign an agreement to pay more...

...No, he says sternly, no merchant on the street will violate that rule...

...James Q. Wilson, in his serious though rather pointless study of crime in England, also gives little comfort to his editor, since it appears that the "socialist" Britons have much sterner attitudes than Americans about the prevention and punishment of crime, and that their less lenient institutions have not prevented a great increase in British crime during the past two decades, although its level is still much below the American level...

...in which the personal and status satisfactions of the producer clearly take precedence over the multiplication of either production through hard work or consumption through a drive to growth...

...What rather gnaws at them, I think, is the fear that they are about to lose that privilege...

...To be sure, the wages of highly skilled trade unionists have approached or surpassed those of, say, schoolteachers or reporters since the wage freeze first took effect (and why not...

...As for the "prestige" and "power" of trade unions, the major daily newspapers are almost 100 percent overtly antilabor whenever a labor-management or union-government conflict arises (except in the case when the government is Labour...

...nor does he compare the crucial statistics of health care, namely those of life expectancy, time lost from jobs because of illness or accident, and infant mortality, for all of which Britain leads the U.S...

...On the other hand, any attempt to bid up the price of labor collectively is seen as the worst kind of monopolistic behavior, as both Brittan and Jay put it...

...A merchant at a major street market, asked for a quantity of the fresh mint that is plainly visible on his stand, replies that the mint is available only to those who also buy Jersey new potatoes, which are eaten with mint sauce...

...IV H ow to explain this attack is another matter...

...Advanced social democracy, meanwhile, as practiced (for example) in Scandinavia and the Low Countries, is a political economy beset by severe contradictions...

...nor does he explain 335 that the remark about inequality, which comes from a Labour minister, is intended to ginger the equalization process in a health service already many times more egalitarian than that available to Americans...

...not the people democratic institutions should represent and protect, but the people they should guard against (also for the old conservatives, who after all saw the working class as a dangerous beast before unions were even legal...

...He also points out that in 1967, by which year there had been less than a decade of serious Labour party government in this century, the pretax distribution of British income was "already fairly egalitarian...

...More subtly, Patrick Cosgrave of the Daily Telegraph laments the "failure of the Conservative Party, 1945-75," by which he turns out to mean the success of its leaders in erecting "a somewhat superficially glittering rhetoric, which convinced the electorate that the more popular elements of the Labour program were accepted...

...B III ut then, for the new conservatives "Labor" is not representing victims but predators...

...In American suburbs and even in many cities today the center of communal, group, and family life is the bowling alley complex: hub of a multibillion-dollar industry that offers among its by-products food (fast and slow) and drink, equipment and machinery, clothing and other accessories, and associated or subordinate forms of entertainment (e.g., dancing, ice skating...

...Seeing Frederick Wiseman's film Meat, about the American wholesale meat industry, one notices that the union and management negotiators are dressed virtually alike, in semi-informal clothes...

...In England refrigerators are very small (an American visitor in an English kitchen can easily miss seeing the fridge altogether) and so are the milk bottles...

...One can only speculate that the prolonged dirge unendingly played out by the residuary legatees of upper-class opinion comes from the sense of failed promise that a once successful, now relatively backward economy produces...

...When the films of Marcel Ophuls are shown on BBC-TV, the dubbed-in English voices signal social class very carefully: officers, politicians (of the right or center), and businessmen speak in the poshest BBC accents, whereas "common" soldiers and workers speak in accents ranging from pronounced working-class to cockney...

...Everyone seems to be in some kind of uniform, even when wearing ordinary clothes...

...What other Europeans call "the English disease," then, clearly antedates by some time the coming to England of the welfare state, which retrospectively was not so much an attempt to humanize a booming economy as to soften the cruel edges of a (comparatively speaking) declining one...

...For British workers, that sense of national failure results in a degree of class bitterness unrivaled elsewhere in the capitalist world, combined with an exceptional degree 339 of political and economic conservatism: fear of collapse leading most often to a desire to preserve rather than to change...

...On the other hand, it is when ideology breaks through the mask of social science that The Future That Doesn't Work actually becomes most interesting, for then at last we learn what really actuates this ideology...

...working-class morale is high while middle-class morale is low...

...Now that the wage freeze has been abolished under pressure from skilled workers, and now that, at last, high levels of 338 unemployment seem to be an acceptable part of the landscape in Britain, all these differentials can be expected to increase...

...340...

...To them too change seems frightening, preservation necessary...

...The only slight hope they see in the future is for a more capitalist America that will avoid the "ills" of social democracy...

...The price of labor is a collective price...

...Any answer, though, must certainly point to the steady loss of national morale that has accompanied the long decline in comparative national productivity and the gradual surrender of Empire, and that was only momentarily and misleadingly arrested by the unifying experience of World War II...

...Unfortunately, the collection offers virtually no serious discussion of those institutions...

...The "power" of the Trades Union Congress too is greatly overestimated and misunderstood by conservative critics in both Great Britain and the U.S., for the sole use to which that power has been put in the life of the present government has been the employment of TUC officials as shock troops to subdue, rank-and-file resistance to the tight money, antiwelfare, proindustry policies of the Labour government...

...But such "new conservatives" as the editor of, and some of the British contributors to, The Future That Doesn't Work, appear to have no interest in such possibilities...

...But it does not occur to these critics of trade-union "monopoly" that workers acting collectively are only acting as the capitalist market economy bids them act...

...Why that fear...

...They are antidemocrats...

...whereas the expressed needs of workers always appear as wilful and arbitrary demands...

...They accept without sufficient qualm, that is, the "engagingly simple" notion that what the great number of people thinks benefits them is what parties of the people should endorse...

...As in Sweden and the United States," he notes, "providing services is now the occupation of a majority of the labor force, including the one out of six who work in the public sector...

...The richest nations in the world (per capita) are social democracies (the U.S...

...The differential in favor of media overlords is in the neighborhood of 5 or 7 to 1, and for company directors up to 20 to 1 (plus stock options, tax havens in the Caymans, etc...

...Most shops and sometimes even large stores are open only at the hours most inconvenient for their customers...

...The political boundaries between the classes, in sum, are still strong, and the political influence of the average British worker or group of workers still feeble...

...or to cut back on the utilization of capacity because of "insufficient demand," even in the face of glaringly evident social need for their products...

...There is an incompetent essay by Harry Schwartz on the British Health Service, which makes the points that the National Health is "threadbare and financially starved," that there are still "great inequalities in the health services available to the people of Britain," and that there is an excess of demand for medical services greater than that foreseen by the National Health's founders...

...And he castigates Edward Heath for having "pondered the spectrum of consensus and, like Mr...

...This kind of one-way reasoning is typical of the neoclassical economists and their journalistic followers, for whom the expressed needs of business (to raise prices, lower output, etc...

...Indeed, the essence of democratic politics is a gigantic celebration of the fact that you can get something for nothing, or at least that you—the individual voter—can get something for nothing...

...Lenkowski's conclusion is that the condition of the British welfare state, for better and worse, is a legacy of Britain's past...

...It is as crucial an aspect of universal suffrage as the vote itself, and repudiation of the strike weapon is again repudiation of democracy...

...None of these contributors seems to have noticed that in discussing Great Britain they are really discussing a past that doesn't work (or that works in ways not appreciated by those of us with other expectations...

...As such, they are interesting and important experiments that may ultimately show either that the contradictions and limitations of capitalism are insurmountable, or that a different and better social system can be generated out of capitalism by peaceful means...

...little that one sees in 1977 seems to call for a reversal of that verdict...

...this offers little support in principle to either the supporters or critics of social democracy, but is a helpful antidote to the shrieks of dismay that surround him...

...As to the alleged class power of the trade-union movement, suffice it to say that after a dozen on-again off-again years of Labour party government, labor legislation in Great Britain is still in a more primitive state in some respects than it is in the U.S., and the grounds on which courts can intervene in labor disputes are even more extensive...

...by international standards": a condition, again, having nothing to do with "socialist" income policies but rather with Britain's position as a traditionalist and relatively nonaffluent capitalist society...

...Thus also a great many lowpaying jobs providing daily milk delivery to the population are kept available...

...Every one of those statements, however, is demonstrably false...

...In that role they always receive considerably more publicity than the actual managers of the enterprise...

...his cursory attempt to assess causes turns up nothing about the impact of "socialism...

...and they are all covertly antilabor, in the sense indicated above, that the actions of workers are treated as wilful, and those of businesses as determined by market forces...

...This is also true of the U.S., of course...

...An academic visitor to England will observe that the prestige of the "new lords" consists almost wholly in their having the privilege of being the subject of vituperative conversation wherever educated people or professionals (except the small band of genuine leftists) get together...

...The tears they shed for social democracy are crocodile tears, because these men are not democrats of any kind...

...In England that center is still the simple pub...

...but a cursory glance at the help-wanted section of the London Sunday Times will show that a systems analyst or sales manager or personnel "expert" earns almost twice as much as a spot welder—plus "perks...

...Britain differs from Sweden and the United States (and even more from other countries still moving in the same direction) in that industrial growth has been laggard...

...Their reasoning also might be called "engagingly simple...

...their withholding thus appears as no more than a short-run incentive to "rational adjustments" to the price of their goods in the marketplace...

...The "engagingly simple political philosophy" of free, competitive elections, writes Peter Jay, may have been a useful corrective to authoritarianism and paternalism, but "alas, it already has built into it the tension—historicists might say the contradiction—that lies at the root of our 336 present troubles...

...The one serious criticism he makes of British social democracy is that though the "service state" succeeded quite well in fulfilling its intentions, it has grown too fast to do so any longer, without becoming a dangerous drag in the context of an otherwise declining economy...

...clerks in expensive shops display attitudes verging on complete contempt toward poten334 tial clientele clothed merely in normal dress...

...are always determined by impersonal market forces ("Drought conditions in West Africa have forced Tate & Lyle to raise the price of cocoa products 22 percent this year...

...having dropped off the lead...

...the price of management and entrepreneurship is (to a much greater extent) an individualized price...

...Peter Jay et al...

...Respondents to a nationwide survey, by significant majorities, expect life to be worse rather than better in the future, hope to maintain rather than to improve their social positions and, given a choice between more leisure or more income, would choose leisure...

...trade-union leaders alone are "in a position to exercise power without apology...

...he is allowed by the other merchants to sell mint to people who are not buying Jersey new potatoes...

...The same is true, in reverse, of intellectuals and professionals...

...They are meant to be treated as averagely priced commodities, and how else can "commodities" act but collectively...

...and tolerant, squeamish British management has "a wholly inappropriate reluctance to recognize that the paternalistic days of benevolent goodwill have long since passed in history...

...tradeunion violence and "thuggery" are "tolerated by liberal squeamishness" though the police are held in disrespect...

...Schwartz does not explain how a poor country could have a rich health service...

...industrial decay and urban blight were already a prominent part of the landscape of several of its major cities at the turn of this century...

...The BBC indeed gives air time to strikers in notorious disputes, but it also tends to focus entirely on exceptionally inflammatory picket-line behavior, never looking at more commonplace strike behavior and also never taking a hard look at what happens inside factories—nor, especially, at the way in which employers use the National Front, or the Special Branch, to break strikes of immigrant laborers...

...trade unions are always portrayed as "David fighting Goliath" in schools and in the mass media...

...English workers do not strike much more often than American workers, but an astonishingly large proportion of their strikes turns out to be against fellow workers, to protect traditional lines of demarcation at the workplace, pay differentials, etc...

...Unwilling to turn on the enduring structure of privilege that (even while they excoriate its excrescences) gives shape to their careers, they attack instead the only other available opponent: democracy, however weak its institutionalization and limited its growth, has been and can be in the future the instrument of change in Britain...

...Fighting their way upward through the still-oppressive class structure (a structure for which Peregrine Worsthorne, significantly, reserves his most passionate denunciation), they find that their hard-won privilege seems feeble and chancy in comparison with that of their American counterparts...

...And none of them will be wage workers...

...Macmillan, moved to the left...

...cannot really be bemoaning the loss of class privilege...

...More: the strike is the only kind of action available to workers that gives them even a remote measure of the kind of market power the giant corporate structures routinely exercise...

...that combined horror of inflation and benign view of mass unemployment that all "informed opinion" now expresses is the essence of their own and their class's ideology...

...The question mires us in the ambiguities of national or class character...

...Lenkowski does not go at length into the reasons for that situation, several of which I've already mentioned...

...trade unionists are "the nouveaux riches and take home wage packets that make them the envy of professional people...

...milk thus does not come in larger containers, and thus there is no need for larger refrigerators...

...The inadequacies of the British welfare state are therefore clearly visible, and defenders of unrepentant capitalism, who usually manifest no interest in the more (much more) successful social democracies of the Continent, have always preferred to study Great Britain, the weak sister of the social democratic world...

...even though it lags behind the Continent...

...Street repairmen spend a lot of time sitting under tents drinking tea, or keeping out of mild rains...

...Members of the very extensive royal family, who do absolutely nothing at all, are eagerly sought after to be the honorary heads of educational and scientific institutions, public-service bodies, and businesses...

...In like language Samuel Brittan of The Financial Times points to "the generation of excessive expectations" [my italics—P.G.], which "follows from the competitive nature of democracy...

...Rather, what dismays them is the success of popular democracy in England: the triumph of universal suffrage, and the achievement of civil liberty for organized workers...

...A majority of the top executives surveyed by the Times were educated at Oxford or Cambridge where, like most of their peers in British business, they received no training in business management...

...But there is one old-age pensioner with a small stand around the corner...

...As Peregrine Worsthorne of the Daily Telegraph puts it, trade unions are the "new lads on top...

...But he does conclude that "the programs of the welfare state deserve relatively little of the blame": so much for "the alternative...

...The unrepentant Tory intellect, a century late, discovers the real horror of universal suffrage and representative government: that once in a while the majority really does rule, and leaders really do what it wants...

...but their affluence depends on the continuing exploitation of scarce resources, many of them subject to other people's sovereignty...

...Most professionals, furthermore, can hope for aprogression in their income-earning powers as they get older that is denied to even the most skilled wage workers...

...But when we are allowed to hear the original French and German voices the social class variations are not nearly so marked...

...Larger milk bottles would not fit into the standard refrigerator...

...Just which more sophisticated political philosophy is supposed to replace simple Benthamite liberalism...

...Their legislation is the most egalitarian anywhere in the "West" (and in some cases anywhere at all), but the progressive income taxes that support this legislation more and more come under sustained assault from the middle classes, who work for the incentive of social superiority only to see the promised reward taken away to produce more equality...

...These counterparts are not exactly impotent in either Sweden or Denmark today, of course, but presumably what Mr...

...The deeper intellectual problem, however, is that the free-market theorist, having argued out of one side of his mouth that a rational price system necessitates the treating of labor as a commodity like any other, now turns around and refuses to accept the logical consequence of the one distinction upon which, more than any other, market capitalism rests...

...M II uch as though an enemy of representative government had convened a symposium on "the political system that doesn't work: parliamentary democracy's failures in Italy," R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the editor of a new American journal called The Alternative (new in being but old in spirit) has brought together a group of American and English contributors, in a book under the overall title, The Future That Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failures in Britain (New York: Doubleday, 1977...

...No one (or, hardly anyone) seems to try very hard to sell anything...

...Peter Jay even refers to "the depradations practiced on mankind by authoritarian and paternalist regimes in the name of higher values...

...In both respect and income, trade unionists still rank toward the bottom end of the table...

...proprietors apologize for prices...

...Once one drops from the ranks of the most highly skilled wage workers to those whose jobs aren't advertised at all but who simply show up at the plant gate or union hall looking for work, these differentials become even more pronounced (although the major effect of the wage freeze in England during the past few years was to narrow differentials between segments of the wage-earning workforce themselves, much to the discomfort of skilled workers and to the destruction of trade-union solidarity...

...On this point ideologues of the new conservatism try to maintain a discreet silence...

...Workers-as-commodities possess no capital and (except for the most skilled among them) they have been carefully trained (or untrained) to have only interchangeable capabilities...