Links, Rechts en de Vooruitgang
Paul Kalma
383 pages, including notes
published in 2004

It's no secret that social democracy, as an ideology, has been in a deep crisis since the late seventies. The resurgence of unbridled capitalism and the thriumph of free market thinking has put it on the defence, with most if not all of its values having been abandonded by the same people who are supposedly its champions. This process has been the strongest in the United States and the UK, but it has also happened in The Netherlands. The PvdA --the Dutch Labour party-- had shed much of its ideology to embrace free market supremacy in the nineties and got punished for it by the voters in the 2002 elections, the Pim Fortuyn elections. It had nothing to offer its core voters anymore and its arrogance, personified in its then leader Ad Melkert, combined with the anger about the murder of Fortuyn, for which it partially got the blame, cost the party the elections.

Though the PvdA has managed to regain some terrain since, mainly through having a more charismatic leader, and indeed is once again back in government, its fundamental problem hasn't changed. The party is still unsure about what course to follow, what its core values are and how to implement them. Links, Rechts en de Vooruitgang is an attempt to revitalise this debate by re-embracing social democracy as an ideology. Paul Kalma sits in parliament for the PvdA and was at the time of writing the director of its scientific bureau, the Wiarda Beckman Stichting. He feels the process of "plucking out the party's ideological feathers" the party underwent in the eighties and nineties was a mistake, that the party needs an updated social democratic foundation to reassert itself. This book therefore is an attempt to redress the balance

Kalma does this by examining three aspects of politics, values, institutions and culture, that together should add up to a new deological strategy for the PvdA. According to Kalma, the core values of this strategy should be the old, familiar values of the French Revolution: liberty, equality and solidarity. In this Kalma puts forth his most important realisation: the simple fact that indeed liberty is not possible without equality, that the two ideas are not in conflict, as liberal propaganda would have it, but reinforce each other. Liberty without equality means that liberty is degenerated to the "freedom to choice", but where the choices are made in advance by those with the money and power to force through their preferences. The best example of this kind of freedom is of course the United States, where only millionaires have a shot at being elected as president, or to Congress.

Values have to be put into practise through institutions and practical policies. Kalma here takes a stance against the idea, also current in his own party, that the government should be content to just "mind the shop" with regards to the economy, leave as much as possible to the free market and only provide services of last resort, like unemployment and disability benefits, with the added condition that these services should be as frugal as possible (and preferably be provided by commercial entities). Instead he shows that the government should not be afraid to intervene, to take control, either directly or indirectly of those parts of the economy which are of a national importance (mostly infrastructure) and strive for a capitalism that goes beyond short term profits. At the same time the for profit principle should be abandonded for governmental services like education and health care in favour of a professional orientated direction.

On other subjects too the social democracy should reformulate its own answers according to Kalma, by taking the best parts of traditional social democracy but taking into account the justified criticisms of its excesses. Kalma takes as a guiding example Tony Blair's old mantra of being "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime", realising of course that in practise Blair's governments only paid heed to the first part of it. The idea being that social democracy should look beyond kneejerk measures to deal with subjects like crime, terrorism etc but also take into account the underlying realities.

Kalma obviously put a lot of thought in this book, but in the end it remains fundamentally flawed. As a socialist myself I'm quite skeptical of any attempt to revive social democracy, as it's even in its purest form a compromise --between capitalism and socialism-- where no compromise is possible. Kalma would fall short for me then even had he gone back to the roots of social democracy, but unfortunately he doesn't even do that. Instead he further compromises his ideology because he has so clearly internalised the rightwing criticism of social democracy: that it's unworkable, stifling and derives people of choice.

He seems to lack the insight to see that the swing towards the right, towards neoliberalism that started in the late seventies was not a natural swing of the pendulum but deliberately engineered. It wasn't that the left was arrogant or had lost its way, took on too much that made people turn away from it, it was through constant propagandising by business interests and liberal politicians. It was because leftwing governments were shackled by "market forces", the banks and international institutions like the IMF that they failed to achieve their goals, not because those goals were in themselves "unrealistic". In short, what miss is any attempt at providing a economic/political framework here, in which to analyse the political developments of the past three decades and in which to formulate an answer. Kalma therefore lacks a solid base for his revitalisation attempt.

Nevertheless, this book is important because it shows that there is part of the traditional Dutch social democratic movement is rethinking its position and wants to move back to the left, away from blindly following the neoliberal consensus. It's also important in providing part of the answer as to how to revitalise this movement, by emphasising the idea that liberty is only possible in combination with equality. Unfortunately it does not go far enough because Kalma in the end accepts the reality of the capitalist system and is satisfied with only making it more humane.

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