Pen-l'ers, Surely it can't come as any surprise that Jospin caved in to Blair and Kohl so easily, given the fact that the Socialists have long stood behind Maastricht, even if they disagreed with the fiscal austerity versions of same. Now that the official social democrats of Europe in their various stripes more or less agree on an EC in which the "socially excluded" are dealt with by being offered EC-backed loans if they are deemed credit-worthy (Clinton's domestic micro-credit model applied to EC), thus resurrecting the old liberal utopia of a nation of shopkeepers, what can/should the left reply in return ? Please, it should not revolve around holding Jospin to his promise to create 700,000 new jobs. The recent pen-l discussion on overwork and consumerism should drive home how bankrupt neo-Keynesian measures such as this are, be they achieved via subsidies to capital, or via state-driven taxing and spending. (I should say parenthetically that I am impressed with the maturity and subtlety of red-green thought on this list lately, so rarely have I encountered eco-socialist ideas on this list in the past). Liberals in this country have focused on "jobs, jobs, jobs" and under Clinton's watch "the economy" (reified) has generated lots of jobs, and where has that got us ? I have not heard or seen Jospin utter one word about the social and ecological use-values of these 700,000 new jobs. Do the Communists and the Greens in France have any agenda as to the use-value contents of a full employment strategy (I assume they do) ? The Socialists' recent (and now discarded ?) advocacy of an EC-funded trans-European high speed rail system was all about reducing the turnover time of capital and bolstering EC competitiveness (and soaking up surplus labor-power simultaneously), nothing about the qualitative (i.e. quality of life and ecological) virtues of mass transit. Jospin's campaign promise of the 35-hour workweek and work-sharing seems a bit more palatable. But I would imagine it was only a rhetorical gesture with no strategy about how to achieve it (since Mitterand promised the same 15 years ago, before money and investment capital markets were as fluid as they are today, and got thoroughly punished), and, anyway, alongside this proposal there was no mention of what social and ecological use-values reallocated labor would be accomplishing. Like the anarcho-punk demonstrator's billboard in Amsterdam read, "get a life, not a job". Social democracy is dead. It was normatively bankrupt, and now it is pragmatically bankrupt, b/c the international market will no longer tolerate it, its standard-bearers will no longer defend it. Cutting-edge social movements, recognizing that it was normatively bankrupt and is now politically impracticable, have moved on to pressure for better things. John Gulick Sociology Graduate Program UC-Santa Cruz
