From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Jan 26 2006 - 12:38:15 EST
British economics commentator Phil Mullan makes quite a good point about markets in a recent article: "The fashionable notion, especially on the left, that governments of all persuasions have signed up to liberal free market beliefs is a fallacy. It is discredited by state practices where market interventionism is less direct but much more pervasive than in the past." http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAF05.htm Here's also a clip from the Dutch social democrat Karen Adelmund (b. 1949) who in the 1990s was an influential SD ideologist here. The quote suggests a (post)modern rationale for social democracy. Adelmund was chairman of the women's union in the Dutch secular Federation of Labour Unions (FNV) 1978-1985 and subsequently a leader of the FNV 1984-1994, and since 1994 an MP in the Dutch Parliament for the Dutch Labour Party: "Society cannot function without political regulation, legislation, property law, labour law, or without financial, economic and social policy. As a foundation for social-economic policy, pure liberalism has been superseded, just as much as the statist economy of the East-European type (although liberalism is still meaningful and makes sense in the sphere of individual freedoms, human rights, equal opportunities etc.). Market economy must go together with a social-economic policy which sometimes creates conditions, sometimes imposing order, and sometimes correcting circumstances. But, additionally, the idea of the "social common denominator" as a substitute for politics is a self-deception. Because the principle "what can be decentralised, must be decentralised" is an empty slogan, as long as no substantive argument is given for what exactly can be decentralised, and what should be centralised. "Confronting liberalism and the subsidization-principle, is the fact, that the social and the economic are interconnected. Thus, the development of wages- and wage-parity policy, the financial deficit, employment in enterprises, labour market policy - to mention a few - are all linked together. Nobody will be very surprised with this obvious insight. But if I conclude from that, that positively influencing these matters practically requires, in its main points, a coordinated central policy, liberals and subsidiarists are suddenly nowhere to be found. "The real world is micro", [Employer's Federation leader] Van Lede claims. I claim in contrast that the real world is both macro and micro. "In his treatise "Welfare and the State" [1989], [sociology lecturer Abraham] de Swaan describes how the cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth century suffered an onslaught of hordes of itinerant paupers. By fighting poverty, that threat could be removed. But not one city was prepared to invest in care for the poor, so long as the other cities did not also do that. Because just imagine, that one city would do it, then all the poor would flock to that city, which then would not not only be unable to pay for its poverty policy, but also suffer a massive social problem. Urban poverty policy could only emerge, if a supra-urban and therefore national obligation came to rest on all cities to care for the poor. But how could such a duty be established? De Swaan calls this the dillemma of collective action. (...) Collective dillemma's cannot be solved at a decentralised level". (translated from K. Adelmund, "Political and social democracy" (1990), reproduced in J.M. Peet et al., Honderd Jaar Sociaal [A Hundred Years Social] 1891-1991. Amsterdam: Sdu publishers, 1998). This is of course a far cry from the original social-democratic slogan about the "socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange", and lacks any particular social vision. Rather the idea is, that the "social domain" must always be managed, and that for this, you require a public administration which actually does manage it. It is a kind of "philosophy of social managerialism", which justifies the existence of the state apparatus, on the specific ground that there are these real problems in civil society, which must be managed, and there exists no other agency that will manage them effectively. The debate then focuses more on styles of management, and there are many styles of management possible course, since the permutations of the division of labour are potentially infinite. Even if certain tasks are outsourced to private companies, somebody must pay for them, hence also the continuing need for an administration of the collective funds (principally from taxes and levies) that pay for them. In Dutch lingo they call it "the boel bijelkaar houden" ["keeping the whole shebang together"] which refers to the maintenance of social cohesion in living, playing and working space. There's a professional conference on it this year here, with luminaries such as Anthony Giddens speaking etc. A source of uncertainty and worry in the debate is that consensual, foundational principles of social organisation are often lacking of a type that would provide a clear rationality of means and ends - point is, every attempt to specify them, is liable to be contested with different values, with different interest groups trying to centralise this, and decentralise that. When you are a public servant as I am at present, you can observe more specifically what all this means - most citizens take for granted that there are roads, buildings, parks, shops, plus a supporting infrastructure of electricity, gas, water, social services etc. plus some sort of order in the totality of all this, rather than a total chaos. We could call this the "public sphere" in physical terms, regulated by laws. It is only when that ordered infrastructure suddenly fails, that most people busy with their individual lifestyles suddenly notice what it means. It's a sort of hidden social substructure of "the market", which in truth could not exist without it at all. In a sense, the controversy about "markets" is rather meaningless though, insofar as the real issues are property rights, the ability to trade, and who should get the income from an activity. This is why Marx thought you couldn't very well analyse distribution in separation from the ownership of productive assets. But precisely because, as I said before, markets imply no particular morality of their own, an ideological bifurcation of the "economic" and the "legal" spheres occurs, the former being treated as a "technical" issue, and the "moral" dimension becoming a legal matter - even though they're very much intertwined. Jurriaan
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