The Challenges of the New Social Democracy: Social Capital and Civic Association or Class Struggle?

In this important study, Raju J Das, Jamie Gough and Aram Eisenschitz provide a Marxist critique of new social democracy as the dominant contemporary strategy for local economic and social development. In both the global North and South, new social democracy seeks to develop social capital, strengthen civil society, build not-for-profit enterprises, encourage self-help, and foster community ties. It seeks participatory forms of local politics to achieve a local class consensus. It promises to improve people's economic and social conditions in the face of neoliberal capitalism, and to empower them. The authors argue that this strategy is severely limited by, and internalizes, its capitalist environment. They show that social enterprise can be developed in socialist ways, and contribute to a local politics based in class struggle. But social capital cannot replace the struggle of the exploited and oppressed against capitalism and for a socialist society, a strategy which the authors outline for the local scale.