and, I'm bouncing almost entirely off the monotonous routine of continually rediscovering just how bad the ALP is here, punctuated by calls for a return to real social democracy when the Labor Party is in opposition. it could also be that I've just read that the ALP's bid for power here in Victoria is going to be made with an appeal to law and order -- not even the Liberals have tarried with this fantasy (Victoria's crime rate is pretty negligible) -- , an assertion that they're even more fiscally austere than the liberal-national govt, and loud moans about how they are more concerned about illegal immigrants than anyone else. harumph.
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au
-----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Tuesday, 13 April 1999 1:41 Subject: Re: [Fwd: Social democracy betrayed -- Le Monde diplomatique]
>rc-am wrote:
>
>>> 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
>