Is Social Democracy dead?

[muon2]

Wow, I'm really surprised my comments didn't spark myriad of condescending / outraged / annoyed replies...

So far this thread has been a discussion among people who are either green, democratic socialists, social democrats or - in my case -  Christian Democrat with leftist tendencies on socio-economic and environmental issues. I think that's rather pleasant, its not a topic where comments from people who are totally alien to the Social Democratic tradition and/or its history will add anything of value.

There is no need to actively try to entice right wingers to come and say you are a naive dreamer etc. That will just clutter up the thread.   

Well for better or worse your long post wasn't tl;dr for me. And it raises some questions on which I'd be curious to get the European view.

Social Democrats should have implemented economic democracy when they had the chance in several countries in the post-war era, but chickened out of this.

What caused the SDs to back away from this direction? Was it satisfaction with the status quo? Did the reliance on nationalized industries prevent movement towards worker ownership?

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There are some particularly intriguing thoughts here. I would think that creating incentives for business to have cooperative ownership might create some new and unusual coalitions. Wouldn't reductions in regulation or targeted tax incentives move some small and mid-sized businesses to support that type of platform? Would it pull in a mix of workers and native business much like one sees in traditional policy debates on tariffs on foreign goods?

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The push towards more family and community responsibility for welfare has generally been a conservative position in the US. If the SDs moved in that direction would that gain them votes in Europe?

[muon2]

Hi Muon

I will try to answer your questions a little by little, since some of them require long answers.

Social Democrats should have implemented economic democracy when they had the chance in several countries in the post-war era, but chickened out of this.

What caused the SDs to back away from this direction? Was it satisfaction with the status quo? Did the reliance on nationalized industries prevent movement towards worker ownership?

It came the furthest in Sweden and Denmark in the 70s and early 80s with the idea of union controlled employee funds (such funds where approved in Sweden, but never implemented) and stranded on a combination of factors. The right wing in both the party and the trade unions wanted to preserve the status quo and was afraid it would be bad for business + many of them saw it as too "socialist" - SDs had a strong anti-communist tradition. The other factor was fear of capital flight. In Denmark their reliance on support from a centrist social liberal party also played a role. Ironically parties to left of SD considered it a reactionary move to preserve capitalism and make the workers into little capitalists!
Reliance on cooperation with centrist parties was an important deterrent in many other countries and was also used internally by the right wing in SD parties to keep the left wing from demanding economic democracy.

There were no nationalized industry in the Nordic countries, but in countries like Austria, France and UK where (parts of) some industries where nationalized there was a reluctance to let workers run them or sell them to employees - it was never really on the table to do so.
The Israeli union movement ran a large number of businesses in this era, but this brought them into conflict with their core values - since they underpaid Arabic Jews and Arabs and other outsiders. Its likely this insider/outsider problematic would also have been a problem in Europe.

Thanks for the answer. Part of my interest in this is that there are many corporations in the US that operate as either wholly or majority employee owned. Many of them give voting shares to employees as part of their compensation which the employees can sell back to the employees trust at fair market value when they leave the company. US law makes this an attractive option for some companies by treating the employee shares as tax exempt retirement income, and by allowing the employee trust to borrow money and provide tax breaks for repayment.

Of course, these aren't completely equal cooperatives since different employees will have different amounts of voting shares. Both years of service and salary level can affect the shares controlled by an employee depending on the mechanism the company uses. However, workers I know in such arrangements seem to like them better than other jobs they've had.