|
Article Excerpt
We get back to, "What are social democrats; they're nothing but a band-aid for the capitalist state, right?"--Former staff person at Ministry of Human Resources, 2001
IN NOVEMBER 1991, after 15 years of uninterrupted rule by a Social Credit Party that in the 1980s implemented Canada's first comprehensive neo-liberal initiative (Carroll and Ratner, 1989), the New Democratic Party (NDP) won a clear majority of legislative seats in the B.C. provincial election and formed a government led by Michael Harcourt. They won again in 1996 with Glen Clark as premier, though by a narrow margin. In May 2001, they were ousted by a consolidated party of the right (Liberals), losing all but two of their seats in the provincial legislature. This decade serves as a virtual laboratory for study of the tensions between "ruling relations" and social reform, as the NDP government sought to reconcile the tasks of state management and social democratization.
What pressures induce sympathetically disposed state officials to renounce or compromise social democratic principles on the way to adopting a defensively oriented state-managerial perspective? This question underlies our post-mortem of the NDP's decade-long tenure of governance. In this study we rely on key insiders to the NDP years for readings of the structural transformations and policy shifts in six government ministries. Their mandates overlapped extensively with the concerns of social movements (namely, labour, ecology, feminism, Aboriginal and anti-poverty) that were, at least at the inception of NDP governance, aligned with the NDP. We interviewed a total of 64 state officials who were directly involved in government, including civil servants (ranging from deputy ministers to directors of programs and policy analysts, n = 45), government ministers (n = 11), and other members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs, n = 5)--each of them connected with one or more of the ministries of Labour, Environment, Lands and Parks (ELP), Forests, Women's Equality (WEQ), Aboriginal Affairs, and Human Resources. (1) We also interviewed the three former NDP premiers who held office for more than a year during this ten-year period. (2)
These interviews inform us about the perceptions that elected politicians and senior civil servants--many with activist backgrounds--had about the promises and difficulties in pursuing an agenda of reform in the ten-year period of social democratic governance. That agenda for change developed within key normative frameworks that cut across the various ministries: an emphasis on regionalism and community participation, the greening of the economy, just resolutions with First Nations, a more egalitarian distribution of income and benefits, devolution of services to local providers, expanded human rights legislation, and gender equity. Specific policy initiatives ranged from land tenure reform and protected area strategies to vehicle emission standards, the freezing of utility rates and tuition fees, pay equity legislation, child-care programs, public housing and homelessness initiatives, and work-incentive welfare and disability entitlements. Legislative proposals and government actions were solicitous of both the business and the social movements sector and incited varying levels of support and resistance that provide the groundwork for our analysis of the NDP's decade in power. Our account identifies the points of tension and contradiction--between government and social movements and between government and capital--in social democratic state management. We focus on the difficulties experienced by the B.C. NDP government in its efforts to mobilize progressive social policies while countenancing business imperatives, an entrenched civil service bureaucracy, and the often single-minded purposefulness of its own social movement allies. In considering the implications of the NDP's record in office, we underscore the limits of "brokerage pragmatism" and suggest new strategies for mitigating the structural power of capital and enhancing the prospects for a politics of social democratization.
Social Democratic Agency and Capitalist Structure
Recent literature has explored the fate of social democracy in the current era of globalizing neo-liberalism, with analysts reaching a mixture of pessimistic and optimistic conclusions (cf. Clift, 2002; Glyn, 1998; Green-Pedersen and van Kersbergen, 2002; Hay, 1999; Mahon, 2000; Teeple, 2000; Schwartz, 1998; Tsakalotos, 1998). Our intent here is not to rehash the debates of this literature but to provide something more novel: an analysis grounded empirically in interviews with actors who were at the centre of a social democratic government. To conduct this analysis we must first clarify what we take to be at the core of contemporary social democracy and how social democratization might occur (or be stymied) as the project of a collective actor embedded within an advanced capitalist system.
As an "historical phenomenon" (Przeworski, 1985), social democracy had its origins in the evolutionary socialism of Eduard Bernstein (1909), who saw at the turn of the 20th century the possibility of an incremental transition from capitalism to socialism, with the ballot box playing a key role. However, in a 20th century whose first half was punctuated by world wars surrounding a deep and protracted accumulation crisis (Hobsbawm, 1994), the era of "evolutionary socialism" was for the most part deferred until after World War II (Sassoon, 1996). By 1949, T.H. Marshall (1963) was able to formulate the postwar social democratic project, with great clarity, in the language of rights. In Marshall's view, social democracy was the latest stage in a sweeping expansion of citizenship rights, beginning with the basic civil rights pertaining to contracts and property that were won by the bourgeoisie in early modernity ("civil rights"), continuing through the strategically crucial advent of universal suffrage ("political rights") and culminating in the social citizenship rights enshrined discursively in the UN Universal Declaration and institutionally in the Keynesian welfare state. By the 1970s, the successes of European social democracy, and its base in strong working-class organization, lent support to the "power resources" account, which held that "the more success for the social democratic forces of the organized working class, the more entrenched and institutionalized will the welfare state become and the more marginalized will be the principle of allocation through the market" (Pierson, 2001: 49; cf. Korpi, 1983; Esping-Andersen, 1990). Yet reforms won by labour and social democratic parties in the 1950s and 1960s were themselves thrown into question in the 1970s with the onset of another protracted accumulation crisis and the rise of neo-liberalism as a hegemonic project. In this new context, Adam Przeworski's (1985) critique, questioning the possibility of an incremental, electoral transition from capitalist democracy to democratic socialism, offered an acute diagnosis of social democracy's problems and prospects.
If a line of thinking on social democracy can be traced from Bernstein through Marshall and then to Esping-Andersen and Przeworski, the most recent formulation of note is that of Giddens (1994; 2000). Identified, perhaps unfairly, with the dubious politics of "New Labour," Giddens attempts to absorb both the exigent reality of neo-liberalism and the "life politics" claims of new social movements into a broad project of "utopian realism" that might revitalize social democracy. But Giddens' argument is predicated on a stylized and misleading conception of social democracy, which compresses the diversity of social democratic strategies and policies into a stereotypical image of an overweening welfare state unsuited to late modernity's heightened reflexivity (Pierson, 2001). Moreover, and even more problematically, Giddens' central claim--that reflexive modernization has weakened the left-right divide by elevating the salience of life politics while demoting the importance of emancipatory politics--is of doubtful validity. Nicos Mouzelis' (2001) reinterpretation of life politics as an emergent, cultural form of emancipatory politics--sensitive both to issues of symbolic manipulation and to practices of cultural/symbolic exclusion--offers a more promising formulation. In Mouzelis' view, a continuing divide can be discerned between the right's abiding commitment to limit the spread of rights downwards and the left's struggle for inclusivity. "Whether one looks at the situation of women, homosexuals, lesbians, ethnic and cultural minorities etc., the Left remains the champion of the spread of rights (cultural and non-cultural) downwards, whereas the Right is against such a spread" (2001: 447). With Mouzelis, we can on this basis define contemporary social democracy as a Left political project for "the deepening of democratization--understood here as both the further spread of rights downwards, and as the progressive decolonization of social and cultural spheres by the economic one" (2001: 454)--a project that reaches well beyond the relatively narrow constituency of organized labour and the institutional apparatus of the welfare state. What is clear from Mouzelis' reformulation is that the constituency for social democratization includes both the labour-left and the "new social movements." A key issue is how to hold such a diverse coalition together and "deepen democracy," while meeting the functional needs of a capitalist system.
In the analysis that follows, we draw heavily upon our respondents' observations and reflections on the difficulties that the NDP government faced in its attempts at social democratization. An analytical distinction that will be of additional use is that between agency and structure, in this case as it applies to a social democratic regime. In his discussion of theoretical approaches to social democracy, Hans Keman calls attention to "the interaction of social democracy as an actor and advanced capitalism as a system" (1993: 310), and notes that social democracy's effectiveness "must be related to its institutional and cultural environment, i.e., the room to manoeuvre."
The greater the room to manoeuvre (also over time) the greater the chance of fundamental and lasting changes will be. In other words, in such circumstances there will be a development or tendency towards social democratization of advanced capitalist society (Keman, 1993: 309).
If Keman's thesis is to be believed, four years after the electoral defeat of the NDP at the hands of an ardently pro-business Liberal Party, it is now clear that no durable, cumulative tendency towards social democratization can be inferred from the NDP years; hence very little room to manoeuvre must have existed for the NDP while in power. The NDP's decade in government led neither to a dominant position in parliament nor to the embedding of social democratic policy strategies--outcomes Keman (1993) identifies with social democratization. Measures that might be taken to exemplify Mouzelis' "deepening of democratization"--and that were championed particularly by the new social movements that were initially aligned with the NDP--were for the most part either put aside by the NDP government or later nullified in the first three years of Liberal government.
In our interviews, we endeavoured to find out what the NDP's room to manoeuvre actually was during its decade of rule and, relatedly, what the principal points of tension and closure were. Following Keman, we can divide the tensions into those associated most clearly with social democratic agency, and those associated with (systemic) structure, which for us includes not only capitalism per se but the capitalist-owned mass media, which shapes much of the cultural environment. Obviously, the difference between agency and structure here is largely one of emphasis: the one bleeds into the other, as the statecraft that is distinctive of governmental agency is constructed in response to the challenges thrown up by "structural conditions" that themselves exist only by virtue of human agency in its relationality (Bhaskar, 1989). We begin our reading of the interview data with an analysis of tensions predominantly associated with social democratic agency.
Dilemmas of Agency
A recurrent challenge facing any elected government is that of representation: namely, representing the diversity of its constituency while also at least appearing to represent the electorate as a whole. The NDP came to power with organized labour at the core of its constituency, (3) and with a whole range of progressive social movements arrayed around that core. Relations with the local capitalist class, a leading supporter of the old anti-NDP coalition that was Social Credit, were distant at best. Whereas the Social Credit government had typically shut out the social movements from decision-making processes--regarding them negatively as "special interest groups"--these same social movements now had a seat at virtually every NDP decision-making forum.
Within the NDP government the problem of representation was framed largely in terms of "stakeholder groups"--all those organized interests with a stake of some kind in a given issue--and the operative means of dealing with the diversity of stakeholders was consultation:
The first thing they [i.e., cabinet] ask when you bring forward any kind of policy change or legislation change is "What kind of consultation have you done, and what are the results ... ?" If you haven't done the consultation, they ask you, "Okay, informally then, what can you tell us about stakeholder response?"
This approach, particularly evident in the Harcourt years, did produce what one respondent called "much more of an inclusive kind of regime" than had existed in the years of Social Credit rule. Yet, much in the way that catch-all electoralism (appealing opportunistically to a vast range of electoral interests) has its costs in disorganizing social democracy's political base (Przeworski, 1985), the quest for inclusivity also imperilled the regime's focus:
That's why the party is always going through trauma--because we always have to try and keep everyone in the tent. So as a party, we go through that difficulty. As a government, we went through that difficulty.
This respondent went on to lament that various stakeholder groups...
|
