Social democracy and neoliberalism: victim or vanguard?

Damien Cahill muses on Social democracy and neoliberalism: victim or vanguard?.

First, neoliberalism wasn’t simply the product of conservative governments imposing an ideological agenda on labour. While neoliberalism has been an attack upon working class living standards and working-class forms of political and industrial organisation, and while some of the most radical forms of these attacks have come from conservative governments, Labour governments and sections of the labour movement were also active agents of neoliberalism either before, or contemporaneously with, the better-known neoliberal governments led by Thatcher and Reagan.

Second, this suggests that the neoliberal transformation of states and economies should not be seen primarily as an ideological phenomenon. Most accounts of neoliberalism view it as a result of politicians coming under the influence of fundamentalist neoliberal intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Yet, if Labour parties and labour movements that had little if any contact or sympathy with such intellectuals were actually in the vanguard the neoliberal revolution, this suggests that such ideational explanations have little to recommend them. Rather, we are better advised to look to the prevailing political-economic conditions of the 1970s, and the ways that these emerged out of the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production and its historical evolution as providing the particular problems to which capitalist states viewed neoliberalism as the preferred solution.

Finally, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the making of neoliberalism was also an active confrontation with and against socialism. Just as Thatcher sought, quite strategically, not only to use socialism as a spectre against which to discursively frame her own policies, but also to attack the social and institutional support bases of socialism in Britain and elsewhere, so was the embrace of neoliberalism by sections of the labour movement part of a reaction against socialism from within the working class and its representative organisations.

Labour’s embrace of neoliberalism was thus a reaction against socialism, against working-class democracy and against economic and political democratisation more generally, none of which have yet recovered from the devastation wrought by four decades of neoliberalisation.

Emphasis Mine

As Humphrey McQueen writes in A New Britannica, this has always been the case with the ALP. Its members preferring parlimentarism over mass action. The ALP believed that there was no class distinction in Australia.

The concept of a workers' struggle is an alien concept. The ALP was always loyal to the nation however the Capitalists defined it.

In a way, aspirationalism has always been the collar around our necks. This very idea that we could become part of respectible society only if we behaved ourselves. This carrot dangling in our faces as we hauled the cart along.

So when Capitalism was threatened by its own contradictions, the workers' organisation decided to make noble sacrifices in order to save the system. Of course, there has never been a reciporal response from our masters. Over the past 150 years, the workers have bourne the burden in order to save the system in order that we might enter into its upper ranks.

All of this talk of exploitation of the workers is drowned out by the distant soft clinking of gold coins. No one wants to question where the wealth comes form if one hopes to acquire some of that wealth some day.