>>526404>The Marxist-leninist says to the socdem: sir, all of your parties capitulated to neoliberalism in the 1980's and 90's. >The social democrat says: sir, all of your parties capitulated to neoliberalism in the 1980's and 90's.both are correct, as it goes. it is important to distinguish between a social democrat of the Olof Palme type (i.e. actual keynesian social democracy, at least before Kanslihushögern put it into a death spiral) which is fundamentally agreeable, a "social Democrat" of the Tony Blair or Keir Starmer type (i.e. not a social democrat, a Thatcherite wearing the corpse of social democracy, advancing a fundamentally anti-egalitarian project), a bitter enemy, and a social democrat of the Helen Clark type. (i.e. someone with social democratic instincts "pragmatically" managing things in a neoliberal world.), a sort of boring neutral which is to be ignored, or used only as a comparator against the Blair type to show that they
had options and elected to do harm.
The first type gives you employee earner funds, the second type refuses to nationalise railways despite it being overwhelmingly publicly popular and despite a crisis where the private sector literally broke the national rail network, which provided an opportunity to do so, and the third type renationalises airlines in a crisis and railways because they're not likely to lose the last election and privatising them was dumb.
those are the three paths a self-identified social democrat can take: idealistic, evil, and pragmatic. all wordly incentives will drag you towards evil outside very, very odd circumstances. autism can preserve idealism, but pragmatism is very both rare and hard to distinguish (Blairites will always tell you that they're being pragmatic, even as they waste half the money they put into healthcare on trying to marketise management of the system because their underlying ideological commitment to neoliberalism tells them this boneheaded dogmatism is
true pragmatism.)