Abstract
This chapter pulls the arguments in the book together, highlighting key points made in previous chapters. It argues that Australian Labor, and social democratic parties internationally, face two major crises of equality, namely the need to address rising economic inequality and the need to address and reconcile the demands for equality by diverse groups. The forms of economic inequality inherent to capitalism have been exacerbated by technology and globalisation, with western social democracy facing new challenges arising from a changing geo-economics. Meanwhile the expansion of social democratic conceptions of equality to include issues such as gender, race and sexuality has both been essential for social justice, and for reflecting the broader composition of the electorate, but has also involved potential tensions between various equality issues and the social groups they represent. Alt-right and alt-left critiques of so-called “identity politics” are also considered as the chapter concludes by arguing that social democratic parties need to continue to address a range of equality issues and cannot afford to return to the narrow and exclusionary concepts of equality that they held in the past.
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Notes
- 1.
There are also the problems that more radical socialist solutions themselves might pose, for example, in terms of how to develop radical forms of socialist democracy that prevent oppressive forms of authoritarian and bureaucratic rule and resolve issues of equitable and efficient distribution. Such issues are well beyond the focus of this current book, but see, for example, Nove (1991).
- 2.
As explained in chapter one, race, like gender and sexual identity, is treated as a socially constructed category in this book.
- 3.
Others note the neglect of blue collar male issues, while accepting the legitimacy of issues such as women’s inequality, see, for example, Rayner (2018).
- 4.
See, for example, WGEA (2018), ACOSS and SPRC (2016, pp. 25, 32), and ACTU (2017). While such forms of inequality may intersect with capitalist class relations, it is important to reject forms of economic reductionism that reduce them to capitalism, not least because they long predate capitalism. Although I cannot develop these arguments in depth here, see my argument that capitalism was actually disadvantaged by the male breadwinner wage (Johnson 1996).
- 5.
See, for example, Smith (1994) and Johnson (2000, particularly pp. 38–54). Australian feminists have a very long history of critiquing neoliberalism, see, for example, Sawer (1982) and Yeatman (2015). So have mainstream women’s organisations, which have tended to be social democratic and/or social liberal rather than neoliberal in Australia. For a recent example of a critique of neoliberal economic policy and its impacts on women, see Coleman (2018).
- 6.
In Australia, the quality and status of vocational training also declined as debacles with public-private partnerships in the Vocational Education and Training sector saw an extraordinary level of rorting by unscrupulous private sector operators (Leahy 2015).
- 7.
After all, Chifley (1949) had supported improving wages and conditions in Asian countries, but had argued that Asians should not be able to migrate to Australia because a mixed race society would result in “trouble and misery”. There are international organisations such as the Progressive Alliance and International Trade Union Confederation that can raise more internationalist social democratic perspectives.
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Johnson, C. (2019). Conclusion: Social Democracy and the Crisis of Equality. In: Social Democracy and the Crisis of Equality. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6299-6_9
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