Da Euroalternatives / Reconnecting Power and Politics

Introduciamo la prima parte di una analisi di Zygmunt Bauman, che è presente per intero sul sito di European Alternatives (www.euroalter.com), anche nella sezione in lingua italiana. Euroalternatives è un progetto che ha alla sua base una visione sociale dell’Europa come costruzione politica partecipata. I paragrafi che seguono rappresentano la prima parte di un articolo di European Alternatives e sono quindi un invito all’approfondimento del progetto e del suo sito. Si tratta di una riflessione di Bauman sul ruolo dei partiti socialdemocratici.

Reconnecting Power and Politics

 

di Zygmunt Bauman

Ten years ago Gerhard Schröder declared that: ‘economic policy is neither left not right. It is either good or bad’. Today we can conclude that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 Then, eleven out of fifteen governments of the European Union were run by socialists. Now – in election after election, in country after country – the left has been elbowed out of state power. The crucial point, though, is that such changes of the guard have ceased to matter.

In the course of the last decade, social democratic parties have presided over an ‘economic policy’ consisting of the privatisation of gains and the nationalisation of losses; they have run states preoccupied with deregulation, privatisation and individualisation.

It is no wonder that voters have come to associate social democrats with the neoliberal policy of dismantling the communal frameworks of existential security leaving individual men and women to manage their fates on their own, from their individual and mostly scarce and inadequate resources. There is now next to nothing to distinguish between the ‘left’ the ‘right’, in economic, or any other, policy.

In recent years to be on the ‘left’ has come to signal an intention to be more thorough than the ‘right’ in carrying out the agenda of the right, and better at protecting such undertakings from the backlash inevitably caused by their dire social consequences. It was Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ that laid institutional foundations under Margaret Thatcher’s inchoate ideas about there being no such thing as society, ‘only individuals and families’.

It was the French Socialist Party that did most work on the dismantling of the French social state. And in East-Central Europe it is the ‘post-communist’ parties, renamed as ‘social democrats’ (wary as they are of being accused of lingering devotion to their communist past), that are the most enthusiastic and vociferous advocates – and most consistent practitioners – of unlimited freedom for the rich and the leaving of the poor to their own care.

(Il resto dell’articolo di Zygmunt Bauman può essere letto su www.euroalter.com, nessun amico dell’Europa è un concorrente, NdR)