No, Social Democracy Started the Problem

Joel Kotkin, who writes frequently about the horrors of California, has written a Social Democracy Good, Woke Progressivism Bad piece.

He argues that social democracy back in the day advanced the interests of the workers, more or less, but that current woke progressivism does not.

Born of the radical Left in Marx’s own time, social democrats worked, sometimes with remarkable success, to improve the living standards of working people by accommodating the virtues of capitalism. Today, that kind of social democracy—learned at home from my immigrant grandparents and from the late Michael Harrington, one time head of the American Socialist Party—is all but dead.

Sorry, but I don't agree. Social Democracy, from the very beginning, imposed the political ideas of the educated youth of the 19th century on the workers.

Now, I believe that, at the time of Marx, it was understandable to think that of course the workers would be screwed by industrial capitalism. And Marx, in Das Kapital, used classical economics to argue that capitalism would "immiserate" the workers. (To a limited extent, in mature industries, it does.) So political power would be needed to curb the power of the capitalists and force a share of the bounty of capitalism towards the workers. Then, when the workers got the vote, social democrats forced government to adapt its traditional loot-and-plunder operations to benefit the workers with pension programs, child labor laws, free education, and health care. Hey, who objects to free stuff?

In my view these programs -- proposed by the educated class that would end up administering these programs -- were and are a mistake.

Suppose we had legislated, instead of Social Security, mandatory savings programs for workers, where workers actually got to own their own retirement funds?

Suppose we had legislated, instead of Medicare, mandatory savings programs to provide end-of-life health care to our grandparents. Not to mention the insurance programs developed by mutual-aid societies in the 19th century -- I am talking about everything from the Masons to the Elks to labor unions.

Suppose instead of free education and a ban on child labor we had universal apprentice programs and kids went to work as and when it made sense to them and their parents? I mean: Today, we force kids to go to school and work for free. Or at least sit in classrooms all day. And we give them unpaid "homework" to do after school hours.

Today we all mourn that the steady increase in the income of the middle class stopped during the 1970s and since then the rich have done well and the ordinary worker's income has stagnated.

Do we even begin to know why that occurred? It might have been because the artificial boost given to worker wages by social democracy had gone about as far as it could go. It might have been because ordinary industrial workers no longer delivered the value that their fathers provided. It could be because of the entry of women into the paid workforce. It could be because tech lords are beasts and snagged all the goodies for themselves. Or it could be that mass immigration, imposed by the educated class, has forced down wages and made ordinary middle class workers compete with the immigrants from beyond the seas.

Bottom line: we really do not know why middle-class wages have stagnated since the 1970s. And I would really like to know, even if I didn't like the answer.

No. I say that there is really not much difference between social democracy and today's "progressivism that focuses on gender, sexual preference, race, and climate change."

Back in the day the social democrats were proposing programs that the educated elite thought would be a good idea for the workers and not coincidentally give them power and status. Today, we have the woke progressives doing the same thing. 

The only difference is that in 1900 government was only spending about 10 percent of GDP and today it is spending 40 percent of GDP.

And I argue that the main beneficiaries of government, then and now, has been the educated class. Your mileage may vary.

It is of course, Trumpism and populism that reflects the middle class's instinct that "something is rotten in the State of Denmark." Spoken by Marcellus to his pal Horatio in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Some things never change!