Indignados in perspective: Is Social Democracy irrelevant in a Post-Industrial Era in the West?

Notes internacionals CIDOB, núm. 53

- De-industrialization in the West, and the concomitant decline of trade unions in manufacturing, has led social democratic parties to jettison their traditional constituencies and join conservatives in dismantling the welfare state.

- The declining significance of manufacturing in the hierarchy of profit-making activities has led to the greater salience of finance and speculation.

- This has vastly increased inequalities in income and wealth across the globe and the first gauge of elections in Europe has been the reaction of markets to the results.

- The consensus among social democratic and conservative parties has meant that there has been little to choose among them, and the rise of new social movements like the indignados and the Occupy movements are an attempt to create a new alternative.

One of the striking claims of the indignados in Spain, the indignati in Italy, the aganaktismenoi in Greece, and the Occupy movements worldwide has been that there is no difference between the political elite, that both conservative and social democratic parties pursue the same policies of fiscal discipline, austerity, and the free market, that the burden of the mistakes of the rich fall on the poor. Why, they ask should the burden of loans gone sour be borne in the form of higher taxes and cuts in government expenditure by the workers made redundant and the pensioners who did not benefit from the loans? And yet these are the austerity and deficit-reducing measures pursued by both conservative and social democratic parties everywhere in the West.

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