Social Democracy and the Crisis of Equality: The Background

Abstract

Social democratic parties face two main crises of equality. Firstly, their central mission involved reducing economic inequality under capitalism, yet economic inequality is increasing. Secondly, that mission historically largely revolved around improving the position of a white, heterosexual, male breadwinner head of household. Consequently, social democratic parties were implicated in constructing exclusionary forms of gender, racial and sexual identity. It was only later in the twentieth century that their concept of equality expanded. So the second crisis revolves around how social democratic parties manage issues such as gender, racial, ethnic and sexual equality. Those expanded equality issues involve both discrimination and their own forms of economic inequality. They intersect with class but cannot be reduced to capitalist inequality and can cause tensions with more traditional constituencies. The chapter mainly focuses on Australian material, arguing that Australia’s pioneering role in the history of social democracy, including in developing its neoliberal-influenced forms, has often been overlooked. Furthermore, its position as a multicultural, but still predominantly Western society located in the Asia-Pacific makes Australia particularly interesting to analyse in the changing geo-economics of the twenty-first century. However, examples are also given from other countries internationally, including Sweden, Germany, Britain, France and India.