>> For social democracy, which holds undisputed sway in all the major
>>countries of Europe, politics means economics, economics means finance,
>>and finance means the markets.
>
>hasn't social democracy always implied this? hardly a betrayal I would
>think. return to fundamental principles more like it, which means the
>gasps every time social democracy turns out to be crap should be well and
>truly redundant by now. how many times can this discovery be made? and,
>what work does this constant discovery do?
No, actually I've been reading a lot of Luxembourg Income Study papers, and it's clear that the social democratic countries, esp the Nordic ones, did in their heyday partly decommodify economic life in the sense of greatly buffering the link between market incomes and material welfare and bringing the poverty rate down to around 5%. They've pared their systems a bit, but they're still very different from the liberal countries (i.e., the predominantly English-speaking ones, like yours and mine).
Doug