Social Democracy

The apologists for capitalism will argue that it is the natural order. That people like and want it.  That the privileged few are better than the rest of us and deserve what they have.

Money is power, but it is also a result of power. More money, more power, more money, more power — a revolving door if you are among the wealthiest 1 per cent. In every system throughout history, economic and social power always became political power.  The world’s inability to deal with our looming environmental crisis are a result of the concentration of economic and social power in the hands of fewer and fewer people.  Oil and coal make money for powerful people. If a minority holds most of the economic and therefore social and political power the result will be that the minority will inevitably reward itself. Its power will grow and ever-expanding inequality will result.That’s how the system works.

 What can we do to fix it? High taxes on high incomes, inheritance taxes on the wealthy, taxes on all forms of property, nationalizing sectors of the economy to bring them under “public” control? these measures may reduce the power of the very rich and perhaps narrow the gap between rich and poor. But capitalism survives. In the past capitalists survived so well that they eventually reversed many of these sort of reforms. They won cuts in their tax rates, the privatisation of state-owned industries and the weakening of unions. Even in  countries that once proclaimed themselves “socialist”, free-enterprise capitalism prevailed once more and a new capitalist oligarchy emerged to replace the party apparatchiks and nomenklatura.

The answer is to this question of who has the power is more democracy. Real democracy. Economic democracy. Workplace democracy. Community democracy. Social democracy as it was originally conceived - socialism