You want your money back??

[politicus]

I still think it is possible, little step by little step, to advance a federalist and Social-Democratic vision of the EU, and gradually improve the severely flawed union we now have in order to build something better out of it. Is this naive? Maybe. But I also think it's the only alternative we have to the utter economic and social collapse of Europe. I'd rather cling to an unlikely utopia than resign myself to this nightmare.

I prefer to be naive instead of falling in the cynical pessimism that dominates in Europe nowadays. Such set of mindsets only drives to the precipice, in some countries in a more dramatic form than the others. My opinion is that decadence is inevitable in the set of Europe if we continue for this route. Also the problem is that socialdemocracy in Europe lacks of alternative proposals and it's in a state of shock and electoral weakness. There's a terrible lack of ideas in general and the short-term thinking dominates all the way. We should be conscious of this to see which is the way of exit. I'm not even very optimistic about the almighty Germany.

In many ways the Social Democratic model is up against the wall. You cant keep up high taxes combined with capitalist ownership because capital just moves away. So either you turn left and introduce some kind of economic democracy, where workers/cooperatives/unions etc. control production or go right and become softcore liberals. Since the 70s/early 80s no-one has no-one has dared turning left and therefore SocDems are in a perpetual defensive position.
Social democracy in the old sense with big welfare states financed by milking the capitalist economy will never really return as a viable option. But the movement keeps pretending that it can and keeps moving to the right ceding more and more territory to the neo-liberals. So basically they have to either accept the fact that they are social liberals or come up with an idea on how to make a market based socialism work in the real world and on a national/continental level and no-one has really been able to do that. So yeah, I don't see them pulling trough.  

[politicus]

I still think it is possible, little step by little step, to advance a federalist and Social-Democratic vision of the EU, and gradually improve the severely flawed union we now have in order to build something better out of it. Is this naive? Maybe. But I also think it's the only alternative we have to the utter economic and social collapse of Europe. I'd rather cling to an unlikely utopia than resign myself to this nightmare.

I prefer to be naive instead of falling in the cynical pessimism that dominates in Europe nowadays. Such set of mindsets only drives to the precipice, in some countries in a more dramatic form than the others. My opinion is that decadence is inevitable in the set of Europe if we continue for this route. Also the problem is that socialdemocracy in Europe lacks of alternative proposals and it's in a state of shock and electoral weakness. There's a terrible lack of ideas in general and the short-term thinking dominates all the way. We should be conscious of this to see which is the way of exit. I'm not even very optimistic about the almighty Germany.

In many ways the Social Democratic model is up against the wall. You cant keep up high taxes combined with capitalist ownership because capital just moves away. So either you turn left and introduce some kind of economic democracy, where workers/cooperatives/unions etc. control production or go right and become softcore liberals. Since the 70s/early 80s no-one has no-one has dared turning left and therefore SocDems are in a perpetual defensive position.
Social democracy in the old sense with big welfare states financed by milking the capitalist economy will never really return as a viable option. But the movement keeps pretending that it can and keeps moving to the right ceding more and more territory to the neo-liberals. So basically they have to either accept the fact that they are social liberals or come up with an idea on how to make a market based socialism work in the real world and on a national/continental level and no-one has really been able to do that. So yeah, I don't see them pulling trough.  

Interesting analyse, and it seem rather intuitive. But here's the problem with it, it's not like the parties left of the European SocDems shows an alternative. Their solution is just transferring more money from people who work to ones who doesn't or just borrowing the money. If they instead tried to come with some suggestion for radical reforms of our societies rather than that, I would say we had a real alternative. As example we have SAS (Scandinavian Airlines, not the British special forces) which is on the way to collapse right now, here the left could suggest that the workers took over the company instead (as it's the workers SAS owes the most money to), but no there's no attempt at any solution from there either, only empty rhetoric. This is just an example, I don't demands that they should suggest that, but it would be nice, if they had some realistic idea how society in the future should work or how we should transfer the means of production to the workers.

If SocDems are ideological bankrupt it's not the only party on the left which suffer from that.

True. But thats not really a critique of the analysis, just an extension of it. Most of the Euro left has been SocDem +10-20% for decades (which makes them left wing populists).

(but since this thread has another purpose I wont pursue this any further)