THE FUTURE OF THE "SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC CONSENSUS"

...For this new stage in the democratic control of economic development, a new stage of the "social democratic consensus" is clearly needed...

...and those for a consensus that would include the Third World are clouded by grave uncertainties...

...it should not be a power to impose administrative planning decisions of the type familiar in the Soviet bloc...

...A history of great achievements is not quickly forgotten in a crisis...

...In earlier periods, any such increase was viewed as a factor contributing to the progressive embourgeoisement of the "workingclass parties...

...The fact that, 25-30 years after World War II, new problems have arisen is no justification for treating this pathbreaking thinker as a dead dog...

...Thus the part of the active population that loses more than it gains from redistributive taxation tends to grow...

...At the same time the bitter wage conflicts, brought about by inflation and in turn reinforcing it, have generated a militancy of a different kind in the trade unions...

...A parallel problem is posed by the increasing competition of "younger" industrial countries in domestic and foreign markets...

...Social embourgeoisement tended to lead to a political radicalization that threatened to alienate some of these parties from the middle-of-the-road voters needed for an electoral majority...

...While the mechanism of the market may eventually achieve both results, it does so only by ever more painful price increases that will fuel both inflation and unemployment...

...Sometimes they succeed, with the predictable result of electoral defeat...

...This touches upon one of the essential conditions for the recovery of the Western world from the economic shocks of the last decade—the restoration of a functioning international currency system...

...This keeps the employed population constantly fighting to maintain their real incomes, while the receivers of fixed incomes, particularly holders of small savings, are at a growing disadvantage...

...Oct...

...But by consciously specializing on a broader range of foresight than normally inspires the market, they should be able to stimulate or slow down specific directions of investment by indirect means—for example, making them more or less profitable by temporary subsidies or tax policies, so as to achieve the essential structural adjustments in good time...

...Social democrats who came to power or participated in government coalitions made no lasting impact on either economic development or international affairs...

...Of course, public research institutions, and the politicians and bureaucrats relying on them, are no more infallible than the market...

...The net result is a recurrent tendency to economic stagnation in the industrial countries —not from cyclical lack of demand, as in pre-Keynesian times, but because of obstacles to growth on the "supply side" in the midst of inflation...

...We are lucky that this has not yet taken the form of rampant protectionism and competitive currency devaluations as it did in the world crisis of 1929-32, though the tendencies are certainly there for all to see...

...It is indeed rational to allow certain old industries to shrink, and to concentrate on other fields in which the Western industries still can lead...

...A striking analogy in American terms is offered by the organizational reform of the Democratic party achieved, under the impact of the Vietnam War, between 1968 and 1972—which produced the McGovern candidacy and its failure...

...Far more fundamental for the survival of the social democratic consensus was the recognition that steady, more or less "exponential" economic growth was bound eventually to undermine its own foundations...

...All this was achieved, in the first 20 years following World War II, at the price of a modest inflation inseparable from full or near-full employment in market economies with a free—or monopolistic—price policy and free trade unions...

...On the last issue, the Euro98 pean Community has made a useful beginning in the two preference agreements of Lome, and it is to be hoped that this example will be followed...

...So the crisis of the welfare state and the belief in Keynesian economics, under the simultaneous impact of steady inflation and recurrent recession, has hit the social democratic parties particularly hard...

...New Economic Problems THE END OF this "golden age" was signaled in the mid-'60s by an acceleration first of the American and then gradually of the international inflation...

...Awareness of this danger arose in two different contexts: one, the outcry of the environmentalists against increasing pollution of air and water by poisonous emissions of industry and by-products of chemical agriculture...

...Growing economic difficulties have resulted everywhere in growing economic nationalism...

...We then observed that the decline of that consensus under the impact of new economic problems has inevitably weakened the attraction and reduced the cohesion of a number of those parties...

...The restoration of a functioning world currency system thus has come to depend on the settlement of a power issue...

...In their attempts to turn back inflation or at least slow it down, governments have tried a variety of devices to stop the spiral...

...Shortages of specific sources of energy—at present oil—and of specific raw materials require measures that will serve both to economize their use and to speed the production of effective substitutes...

...It has proved insufficient for coping with the new problems of the present age because it did not go far enough—not in the direction of a Soviet-type replacement of the market economy, which has not proved superior by any means, but in its own direction of democratically steering the market economy...

...At present, such a drastic repeal of the achievements of the "social democratic consensus" is still exceptional in Europe...

...The British Labour party is a case apart, because of the organizational separation between the collectively affiliated trade unions and the constituency units based on individual membership...

...The Dutch party of Labor appears to have largely succumbed to the attack...

...Such a new international consensus could not be created by the governments and bureaucracies alone...

...The first such period of great advances lasted from the formation of the first mass parties in the latter part of the 19th century to the First World War, the split in the international socialist organizations, and the Rus93 sian Revolution...

...More fundamental, and more difficult to settle, are the demands for a greater share of power for the "underdeveloped" majority of mankind in such international institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund...

...Now, however, the crucial shift in composition of these parties has been brought about by the mass entry of left-wing intellectuals in the aftermath of the (Westwide) student revolts of the late '60s...

...Both the striking advances of Japanese exports on the world markets and the successful appearance of the cheap products of such "new industrial countries" as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and also 95 Brazil and Mexico are causing difficult problems of adjustment for the "old" industrial countries of the West...

...On commodity prices, the demand for "indexing" them, which would create a North-South inflationary spiral analogous to the familiar wage-price spiral, has been generally resisted by the industrial countries...

...The other is the creation of mechanisms for the international, if not supranational, coordination of such structural policies...

...Roads to a Solution WHERE THEN are we to look for the solution...

...Even more, the new effort to bring about selective economic growth by the increasing use of structural policies will require the greatest possible harmonization in this field...

...Instead, we need a deliberate easing of the transition to new structures—by promoting new industries in areas hit by the decline of the old, by retraining labor and, in many countries, by a housing policy that deliberately increases labor mobility...

...Nowhere did this period bring about social democratic participation in these democratic governments, nor did any of the social democrats gain influence on the governments' economic or international policy...

...Its potential social democratic character was signaled by the dramatic electoral victory of the British Labour party in 1945, and confirmed by the constructive role of the social democrats in many European postwar governments, down to the belated introduction of a Keynesian "stabilization law" in the German Federal Republic in 1967—the year after the German Social Democratic party had at last joined the government in the Grand Coalition...

...Rise of the "Social Democratic Consensus" THE SECOND PERIOD of great social democratic achievements began, as mentioned earlier, with the Swedish party's election victory in 1932...

...Suffice it here to say that a return of the Western industrial economies to steady progress is unlikely unless the above demands are increasingly met...

...The experience of the European Economic Community offers little hope that such coordination will be easy: in the absence of a common European public opinion, competing interests have recently gained the upper hand precisely as the economic problems were becoming more difficult...

...In settling this issue, it is clearly necessary to take account of the new financial strength of the oil countries...

...Avoiding the twin dangers of inflation and recession in the "Keynesian" global scheme required some harmonizing of various national monetary policies, and this was achieved, at least to a limited extent, while the Bretton Woods international currency system was in effect...

...In the first two, cases, an initial competitive disadvantage may later turn into an advantage, if the less farsighted neighbors eventually follow suit...

...Ideally, national decisions regarding the stimulation or discouragement of specific industries and processes in the interest of adjustments to resource scarcities or in order to protect the environment should be subject to some form of international, if not supranational, coordination...

...A particular state that moves ahead of its neighbors and competitors in structural adjustments to the changing international division of labor may 97 well benefit from its initiative...

...A more original device, the "social contract," offering tax reductions to the workers in return for wage restraint, was successful in Britain for two years...

...an extension of social security, varying in degree from nation to nation but generally considerable, and advances in redistributive 94 taxation...

...It was a missed historic opportunity that the first direct elections to a European parliament were not used (so far as I am aware, in any country or by any major party) to educate the electorate to the need for common European policies on common urgent problems —for instance, regarding energy savings and the development of new energy resources...

...Among these, imposed price and wage stops have proved utterly futile, at least in democracies in time of peace...

...The International Aspect THERE IS still one serious obstacle to making such structural policies effective: not all of them can be successfully carried out within the framework of the traditional national state, at least not in Europe...

...Here we can only touch upon Third World problems in passing, in connection with their actual or potential impact on the West...

...8, 1980...

...In Sweden, since 1976, the "bourgeois" governments that have followed after 44 years of social democratic rule have still broadly kept within the consensual framework, though with rather unsatisfactory results...

...But a beginning has been made with the creation of stocks and funds that contribute to price stabilization...

...The Netherlands and Sweden are notable exceptions in this general pattern of public neglect...

...The problem is to reach agreement on the quotas each country should contribute of their own currency, should receive in special drawing rights, and, above all, on each country's voting power in the IMF...

...This belief in the welfare state was not held by social democrats alone...

...The Bryant Spann Memorial Prize of $750 will be awarded by the Eugene V. Debs Foundation in 1982 for the best article, published or unpublished, written in the Debsian tradition of social protest and reform...

...What also needs to be met is the demand for a "code" that would regulate the relations between Western multinational companies and the Third World countries in which they invest, a code that could clearly be in the interest of both sides...

...Any increase in unemployment will diminish the yield of both income taxes and social security contributions at given rates, while increasing expenditure for unemployment benefits...

...Reality soon demonstrated the problem: each specific source of raw materials or energy had its natural limits—a fact with which a policy of steady economic growth was bound to clash repeatedly unless it took them into account in advance...

...There are cases where the older industries have simply fallen behind by lack of initiative and technological progress and only are in need of a more dynamic leadership...

...We are very far indeed from such a state of mind...

...Since then the speed with which OPEC has consolidated and exploited its monopoly, and the comparatively slow development of either energy-saving measures or alternative resources by the industrial countries have resulted in continuing increases in energy costs...

...But it is as clearly not possible to base voting in the IMF, or in the World Bank, on an approach to the principle of equality between states that obtains in the United Nations Assembly...

...Only when these fundamentals of the welfare state were aggressively, and for the time being successfully, challenged —first by the new anti-Keynesian militancy of the British Conservatives, and then by America's Republicans led by Reagan— did the general public become aware of how broad the "social democratic consensus" had previously been...

...At the end of the process, a growing part of the electorate may come to oppose the "excesses of the welfare state"—as has been particularly noticeable in the Scandinavian countries in recent years...

...The interwar period that followed was, on the whole, inglorious...

...At the time this was not produced by any inherent economic necessity, but by mismanagement of the American currency in the context of a balance-of-payments deficit that stemmed partly from the Vietnam War and partly from the seductions of the Eurodollar market...

...Many of the latter always contained strong non-working-class elements, and most of them now appear to have been taken over by a militant New Left under 100 strong Trotskyist influence...

...The effect of this process was unevenly felt in different national parties in accordance with their political and organizational history...

...These operate both as a spur to inflation in a world deprived of the built-in brake of a stable international currency system, and as a tangible barrier to economic growth...

...Those who dispose of financial surpluses vital for the functioning of the world economy must have an important say in the management of international currency and credit problems...

...I can see two principal directions for improving the mechanism of steering a market economy in the public interest...

...This (while modest in most cases) together with the general improvement of living standards and social security contributed to the virtual disappearance of the "proletarian" status of the industrial working class, leaving only minor—and all the more offensive —pockets of real poverty...

...Like the consequences of resource shortage or environmental damage, these are structural problems that cannot be solved by "Keynesian" injections of global demand...

...the achievement of full trade-union rights, and, in varying degrees, the beginnings of social insurance...

...decades of striking success prove the contrary...

...In particular, no concept of how to use government power for steering a market economy had yet been evolved when the British Labour government collapsed in 1931, and the German Social Democrats proved unable to put forward an effective work-creation program to meet the world economic crisis that brought Hitler to power...

...he was not a mountebank offering a panacea but a serious economist dealing with the urgent problem of his time...

...Moreover, inflation tends to increase the income tax burden as a rise in nominal incomes moves the taxpayer into higher tax brackets even though he may have received no increase in real purchasing power...

...By now a group of outstanding representatives of the "social democratic consensus" have broken away from the party, demonstratively adopting the name of Social Democrats, while others fight on inside the old party in the hope of reversing the verdict at the next party conference...

...The first is the "postindustrial" decline in the share of the industrial working class in the population of the advanced countries...

...The Impact on Social Conflict THE END OF steady growth and stable employment and the repeated onslaughts of inflation and recession have, of course, also had an impact on the machinery for social security and on the scope of redistributive taxation...

...But that inflation was generally viewed as tolerable as long as it did not exceed annual average rates of 3 percent in Europe and 5 percent in the United States...

...Thus, if the new order is to work, the recognition of the need for making substantial material concessions to the suffering majority of mankind in a "New International Economic Order" must not lead to recognizing the claim of that majority for power over the levers of international currency and finance...

...It had become the principal highway to their goal of ever-increasing social justice—the tangible justification of their nonrevolutionary road to socialism...

...The German and Scandinavian Social Democrats have coped with the intellectual attack on the "social democratic consensus" by a mixture of limited concessions and organized old-guard resistance...

...But there have been other factors—above all, social composition and organizational structure —that have been influencing the role of the social democratic parties as well and may affect their ability to contribute to a new consensus that must deal with the present problems...

...Second, it cannot, and should not, bring another round of apparently limitless growth of mass consumption in the rich countries, but will have to aim at stability and security on a moderate level...

...It follows that a new "social democratic consensus" within our Western world is a realistic goal worth striving for— but only if three limitations are kept in mind...

...The North-South Aspect ONE MAJOR PROBLEM has played, in most Western countries, an unduly small part in the considerations of the old "social democratic consensus": relations between the advanced industrial countries of the West and the poor majority of mankind in the "Third World...

...In the last decade, the demands of the first kind have been concentrated less on the problem of public loans (except on their terms and the need for cancellation of debts) and more on the terms of trade—notably the stabilization of world market prices for Third World commodity exports, and the opening of Western markets for semi-industrial and industrial exports...

...This generalization could be converted into practice because the adoption of "Keynesian" policies in most Western countries was combined with the creation of a favorable international framework by the introduction of a flexible but reasonably stable world currency system in the shape of the "gold exchange standard" adopted at Bretton Woods, supported by the American Marshall Plan for the postwar reconstruction of Europe, and by the gradual creation of a European Economic Community...

...Some of them are still in power...

...The Role of the Social Democratic Parties AT THE START of this essay, we saw that the postwar "social democratic consensus," while by no means confined to supporters of social democratic parties, bears its name with good reason...

...Keynes, of course, would never have suggested that they could...

...The net result is that the welfare state, in order to maintain a stable level of effective benefits, has to impose a growing burden on both insurance contributors and taxable citizens...

...q party democracy for policies far different from the "social democratic consensus...

...For further details write to the Bryant Spann Memorial Prize Committee, c/o The Department of History, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809...

...Social democrats still rule Austria and govern West Germany in coalition with the liberals, maintaining most of their earlier achievements under increasingly precarious conditions...

...The American New Deal, more consciously based on an (imperfect) use of Keynesian techniques, followed almost immediately, and also brought great advances in trade union organization and labor legislation...

...Inflation, of course, also sharpens social conflict more directly by producing the wageprice spiral...

...That impact, apart from OPEC's oil monopoly, is made by two major kinds of demands: demands for a direct transfer of Western resources (even with the prospect that eventually the West will also benefit from the consequences of such transfers), and demands for a share of power in matters of worldwide currency and credit policy...

...The oil crisis caused by the Arab boycott at the turn of 1973-74 marks the point at which this real problem entered the general consciousness of the Western world...

...The advanced industrial world must, and will, renounce dysfunctional privileges...

...It would be unjust, on the other hand, to pretend that the mass influx of young intellectuals into social democratic and broadly "liberal" parties (in the American sense of the term) had contributed nothing but sterile, doctrinaire extremism...

...Thus in some cases, the discussion between the young intellectual newcomers and the old social democratic core may actually promote the adjustment of ideas needed for a new consensus...

...Of those three groups of problems, the successful development of an internal consensus on structural policies for selective 99 growth inside particular advanced countries may be less far off than it sometimes appears to be under the acute pressure of inflation and recession...

...This period brought all over Western, Northern, and Central Europe the victory of democratic political institutions, founded on government responsibility to parliaments freely elected by equal suffrage...

...In the U.S...

...The experts have long agreed on the principle that such a system should not again be based on one or two privileged reserve currencies, but on "special drawing rights" on a mixed basket of national currencies managed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF...

...Thus the provision of full employment and steady economic growth after the war came to be accepted as the responsibility of democratic governments...

...The basic condition for dealing successfully with the causes of stagnation, unemployment, and inflation is a sufficiently rapid structural adjustment of the advanced industrial economies...

...The same applies in principle to the adjustments needed to protect the environment against pollution...

...The traditional working-class core of these parties for the most part defended the pragmatic reformism of the "social democratic consensus," whereas the intellectual newcomers spoke out for a neo-Marxist revivalism totally unrepresentative of the middle-class strata from which they had sprung...

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...Its fundamentals had come to be accepted by most of the "bourgeois" parties in a number of European countries, and had even come to be taken for granted by majority public opinion in the United States where no major social democratic party existed...

...It would require the readiness of national electorates to accept, in certain fields, the subordination of national sovereignty to supranational majority decisions, with the understanding that the supranational decision-makers would be responsible to a supranational—for the foreseeable future, European—parliament...

...If our analysis is correct, there is no reason why the current stagnation should lead, mankind as deep down as did the interwar crisis, which led to Hitler's triumph and Hitler's war...

...It brought the advanced Western democracies a period of unexampled growth in production and improvements in the standard of living, stable but for some comparatively minor recessions...

...Their power over the economy should therefore remain limited...

...For them the welfare state, with its basic concepts of "full employment" and social security, had not only been a decisive practical achievement...

...One is the increasingly conscious use of structural policies for influencing the direction of investments as distinct from their global level...

...For the last decade witnessed both a "postindustrial" decline in the proportion of the industrial working class and a massive influx of intellectuals and would-be intellectuals, propelled to the left by the student revolts of the late 1960s and by the cultural crisis of Western values...

...What is meant is not merely a crisis in terms of the influence and self-confidence of the social democratic parties, their loss of government power in a number of countries, and the decline of their internal cohesion almost everywhere—but a crisis of the general belief in the welfare state...

...in the last case, the disadvantage may become permanent if they refuse to do so...

...It ended when the unions' middle ranks and shop stewards rejected the "contract" in defiance of the moderate leadership, as the cumulative decline in real wages came to be felt as intolerable...

...But the same is not necessarily true for the state that moves ahead in saving energy while its neighbors continue wasting it, or turns to initially expensive substitutes, or (least of all) protects the environment by methods that inevitably raise production costs...

...In the course of the past decade, however, the threat to those economic and social achievements, combined with changes in the social composition of many of these parties, has undermined both their social and their ideological cohesion...

...This was no accident, for the Swedish school of economists, drawing on the work of Knut Wicksell, had independently developed some of the seminal ideas generally associated with the writings of John Maynard Keynes...

...this gap is widened by inflation, which also tends to raise the cost of health services disproportionately...

...The result is a paradoxical situation...

...The conditions for an international consensus among the advanced democracies on those matters are much more difficult to fulfill...

...as in Europe, the contrast between the results of an inner-party democracy influenced by strong contingents of ideological activists and the requirements of success in a democratic election is evident...

...This belief had been founded in part on the Keynesian concepts and techniques of ensuring high employment and steady growth in a market economy by a public policy regulating the level of total demand, and in part on a high level of social security, achieved by combining insurance contribution with redistributive taxation...

...So far the fashionable "antiKeynesians," who prefer to belittle his work rather than investigate the new problems, have given us nothing but the misery of Margaret Thatcher's Britain...

...Third, as long as it remains a purely Western achievement, which the "social democratic consensus" has been so far, it will remain precarious because of the uncertainty of relations with the non-Western world, not only to the East but also to the South...

...the other, the threatening exhaustion of naturally limited raw materials and sources of energy...

...and third, because, being a purely Western consensus, it did not go far enough in conceiving and negotiating policies for the improvement and stabilization of NorthSouth economic relations...

...Such problems, in the long run, will not be solved by protectionism, which will merely postpone the inevitable at the expense of world trade and the general standard of living, nor by a passive laissez-faire policy...

...administration felt compelled in 1971 to suspend the convertibility of the dollar into gold at fixed prices...

...Since, under the Bretton Woods system, the dollar had gradually become the universal reserve currency accepted in the place of gold, its accelerating inflation was bound to undermine the operation of the system, until it finally broke down when the U.S...

...All the policies discussed in this section mark a new stage in the development of a public steering of the market economy...

...What is needed in order to prevent future shocks is more foresight than the unaided market has shown so far—foresight that must be deliberately practiced by public institutions and should inspire timely measures of public structural policy...

...For, along with the generally admired unshackled development of the productive forces, it unleashed increasingly destructive forces as well...

...The common denominator of those developments is that the combination of economic hardship and penetration by intellectual doctrinaires creates situations in which organized activist minorities can try to take over social democratic parties by manipulating innerThe Eugene V. Debs Foundation has awarded Its second annual Bryant Spann Memorial Prize — to two authors: Jack Metzgar for his "Plant Shutdowns and Worker Response," The Socialist Review (Sept...

...First, it is likely to be achieved only gradually as it wins the support of public opinion in one country after another, and as international cooperation based on it develops...

...A First Summing-Up THE "SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC CONSENSUS," ID SUM up our argument so far, has not been hit by a crisis because it was based on false premises...

...The combination of these two processes has resulted not only in the recent adoption of an extremist platform by the party's conference and executive, but in an effort to force this policy and a corresponding new leadership upon the party's parliamentary group, whose majority still feels responsible to the electorate that sent them to Westminster on quite a different platform...

...Please enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...The discussion of the "limits of growth" at first centered around the abstruse problem of whether an absolute limit of economic growth was mathematically predictable or whether human ingenuity was capable of pushing the limit farther by developing new technologies and resources...

...Not only do the present rules of the European Economic Community make majority decisions all but impossible—on the whole, they also have the backing of the sovereign national electorates...

...Keynes and the "social democratic consensus" that arose out of the application of his thoughts have given us a quarter-century of unexampled prosperity and security...

...But in quite a number of cases conditions favoring the "newcomers" are such that a shift in the international division of labor has become inevitable...

...The social democratic parties, after all, have had a major share in bringing it about and defending it...

...Altogether, given both the erosion of the old consensus by the new economic problems and the inner-party strains caused by the changes in social composition and the new ideological inputs, the bulk of the social democratic parties have so far survived rather well...

...The road to a new "social democratic consensus" based on old achievements and new insights for coping with the new problems is still open—if we have the clearsightedness, the patience, and the determination to take it...

...Attempts at "concerted action" by voluntary consultation between government, employers, and unions have had limited success as long as the pace of inflation was slow enough to make moderation appear worthwhile for both sides...

...Another cause is the structural decline in a number of Western industries owing to large-scale changes in the international division of labor...

...But 96 there as elsewhere the survival or restoration of the consensus is bound to depend on a solution of the new economic problems described above...

...But it cannot, and must not, abdicate the functions that flow from its advanced state while the difference lasts...

...This label indeed is justified, for the social democrats not only had been the pioneers of the new economic and social policy —the Swedish election of 1932, which had brought the social democrats to power with the first program of this type, had indeed preceded the New Deal—but in many countries they had been its most consistent and solid supporters...

...Yet it is not only a new consensus within each country but an increasingly international consensus that is needed to ensure the effectiveness of the policies outlined here...

...I am not suggesting that the oil crisis and related problems of raw material shortage or environmental damage are the only causes of the current tendency to "stagflation...

...Where the element of neo-Marxist revivalism was less prominent, this influx often has contributed a greater sensitivity to the new problems of our societies, particularly a greater awareness of ecological issues and of the responsibility of the industrially advanced nations toward the less developed part of the world...

...Social democrats in several European countries then undertook to learn from the catastrophe of the German and the success of the Swedish—and the American—democracies by developing an economic "plan" for overcoming the Depression, but at first only the Norwegians succeeded in winning power on this basis...

...Earlier Achievements and Setbacks IT IS NOT the first time in the long history of the social democratic movement that a period of great achievements has been followed by a crisis...

...Their achievements in those interwar years—from the eight-hour day and labor legislation in Germany after 1918 to the social legislation of Uon Blum's first Popular Front government in France— were essentially the completion of tasks the movement had already set for itself in the preceding period...

...The measures taken by Western governments to protect the environment have further contributed to slowing growth in some directions...

...they cannot run the world's currency and credit system if they are to be governed by a majority of states that are heavily in debt...

...It is failing because, first, it did not go far enough in developing structural policies for selective growth...

...As industrial workers traditionally constituted the major force in most social democratic parties (except in France and Italy where the Communists controlled the majority of the industrial working class), this population shift was bound sooner or later to increase the role of white-collar elements in these parties...

...Thus the "social democratic consensus" gradually developed in the quarter-century that followed World War II...

...The IMF and the World Bank, however, have to make such decisions all the time...

...To these other factors we must now turn...

...Only the restoration of full employment in Britain and in the United States during the Second World War led to the general conviction that what had been possible as part of the war effort must also be possible for peaceful purposes...

...The French Socialist party as refounded by Mitterrand now probably has a stronger working-class element than in earlier times, owing to its rapprochement with the trade unions of the CFDT...

...The Assembly passes resolutions intended to reflect world opinion, but it has no executive power and makes no practical decisions...

...most of them have a good chance to fight another day...

...Over and above "Keynesian" global steering by way of influencing the level of investment, they aim at influencing its direction in order to achieve selective growth in adjusting to new conditions...

...1980), and Rod Davis for his "The Onion Revolt," The Texas Observer (Oct...

...In the event it was the British working class that first broke away from the "social democratic consensus," thus helping a new Conservative leadership, totally opposed to that consensus, to win a sweeping electoral victory and, with that victory, to depress the workers' condition to a lower level than they had known for decades by a policy of massive unemployment...

...second, because it did not go far enough in developing steering institutions above the level of the national state...

...Their errors may at times be very costly...

...This steady but limited advance came to an end with the war and the collapse of the Second International and the split in the socialist movement...