Willy Brandt: the Life of a Statesman, Part 11 of 12

We should not be drawn into the false choice between revolution and evolution, but rather, we should crave the Cambrian Explosion, whose basic force was evolution and whose result was revolution.

The many, many failures of imagination lead to sad results for generations, disappointed hopes, circumscribed dreams. We can do better, and we must do better. But let’s start by understanding these failures.

Here was Social Democracy at high tide:

Brandt’s popularity at the beginning of the 1970s was at a record high, and he seemed to be completely in tune with his contemporaries’ hopes.

Computer programming, accounting, inventory management — there are many white collar careers where an apprenticeship would be more appropriate than a 4 year university degree. But rather than reinventing white collars careers so that they could have apprenticeships, it was instead decided that more people needed to go to 4 year universities:

The first step was to deal with the traditionally exclusive and academically focused Gymnasium schools, which were still only attended by 6 percent of 13-year-olds in 1960, a number which needed to increase significantly.

And yet, I know from my own experience, most people can start off as computer programmers after a 6 month training, and then they can learn on the job. Why wasn’t this kind of reinvention of considered? Likewise, most lab work, in a scientific setting, if people spent their years 14-18 getting ready to work in a lab, they would be ready at age 18, and they would not need to go to university. The turning away from working class educations was the beginning of our modern era of concentrating wealth. That these failures should happen at the high tide of Social Democracy suggests that there were other political problems that needed to be addressed, problems that lived beyond the horizon of the imaginations of Social Democrats. In crucial ways, the Social Democrats are simply too conservative to take humanity where it needs to go.

About this:

All his reforms were inspired by the same goal, whether his new penal law which emphasised the rehabilitation of criminals, or his plans for joint management, which aimed to increase employees’ power and improve their representation on the governing boards of businesses (although this had to be shelved because of managerial resistance).

If a hard charge against your enemies strongest point has no chance of success, even when you are at your strongest, then it is time to think about flanking strategies. If the direct approach to worker democracy failed, then it was time to think about broader coalitions with other social classes and other social factions, to bring about some approximation of a wider democracy. The resistance to legalized abortion offers what could have been a simple case:

...However, many promised reforms never materialised – not because they had been promised lightly, but because of the difficulty in getting them past the conservative majority in the Bundesrat, the upper house representing the Länder at the federal level.

In response to that, Brandt could have made it a priority to appoint more women to every position he possibly could, so as to undermine the normalcy of the position of the conservative Länder. But he himself was ambivalent about abortion, and it was precisely the places where the Social Democrats were secretly in agreement with the Conservatives that were the very places, the very zones of conflict, where the political situation began to shift and move against the Social Democrats.

And finally:

The monetary crisis that began in 1971, and the economic crisis that followed the 1973 oil shock, brought dreams of ‘more democracy’ to an abrupt end.

It’s one thing to think (as Brandt initially did) “I dislike the extremes of Communism and Fascism, therefore I will reconcile myself to progress by democratic means” and it is something else to then think “Democracy is too expensive, so why bother?” There are many situations where “more democracy” can be less expensive than more edict based approaches. Again, when the Social Democrats were at the peak of their power, they demonstrated a sad lack of imagination. Perhaps this is why neoliberalism began. It is noteworthy how many Social Democrats went along with neoliberalism, because they could not imagine an alternative.

Willy Brandt

Life of a Statesman

By Hélène Miard-Delacroix, 2016

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Page 144-149

Lowering the age of majority to 18 gave a greater proportion of the FRG’s youthful society the opportunity to participate politically, and the liberal intellectual Ralf Dahrendorf’s maxim that the right to education is a fundamental civic right inspired an education policy that grave many more young people access to education, whether academic or professional. The first step was to deal with the traditionally exclusive and academically focused Gymnasium schools, which were still only attended by 6 percent of 13-year-olds in 1960, a number which needed to increase significantly. For the project of ‘expanding education’, as it was known, to work, Brandt had to get the governments of the Länder on board, as they had authority over matters of education. This was easily done. The Chancellor invoked the federation’s duty to ensure that all citizens throughout the country were treated equally, and referred to Article 91 of the Basic Law, which defined certain ‘joint tasks’ that allowed the federation to intervene in the affairs of the Länder if it was in the interests of the ‘improvement of living conditions’. A joint committee consisting of the federation and the Länder was set up in order to implement changes across the federal system and drew up a general plan for education, with the goal of improving the country’s scientific and technological level, in part by establishing numerous new educational institutions. The whole reform was carried out in the spirit of the times: there was general movement towards democratisation by eliminating hierarchies, introducing joint management and encouraging equal opportunities.

Brandt and his life story embodied this new aspiration. His popularity at the beginning of the 1970s was at a record high, and he seemed to be completely in tune with his contemporaries’ hopes. It was a skill he had learned in his Berlin years. His style symbolised simplicity at the same time as being full of energy. Opinion polls, and especially reactions to his public appearances, bore witness to the population’s genuine enthusiasm for the man they affectionately called ‘Willy’. His charisma was praised. He knew what people meant when they called him the ‘German Kennedy’: he was the face and voice of the population’s hopes for progress.

What the opposition saw as an anti-authoritarian shift was, for Brandt, simply the humanisation of authority and the introduction of empathy to government. All his reforms were inspired by the same goal, whether his new penal law which emphasised the rehabilitation of criminals, or his plans for joint management, which aimed to increase employees’ power and improve their representation on the governing boards of businesses (although this had to be shelved because of managerial resistance). His reforms were not only aimed at young people. The age of retirement was lowered to 63 in 1973, and there were provisions for improved care for disabled people. However, many promised reforms never materialised – not because they had been promised lightly, but because of the difficulty in getting them past the conservative majority in the Bundesrat, the upper house representing the Länder at the federal level. The plan to reform Paragraph 218 of the penal code, concerning abortion, provoked fierce debate. In contrast to most of his party, Brandt was not personally in favour of abortion. Privately, he remembered the circumstances of his own birth, and the choice his mother might have made, although he seemed to have forgotten the fact that abortions were already being carried out in those days, in secret and in horrific conditions.

Changing people’s lives, democratising and modernising the country, all required determination and faith in politicians’ ability to effect change. Already in 1961, Brandt had bravely declared that the skies above the Ruhr (Germany’s biggest industrial region) needed to become blue again, by which he meant taking environmental issues seriously. The environment was gradually becoming part of the modernisation process. Brandt was pleased with the progress of his town planning programmes, aimed at reorganising cities and transport. To an even greater extent than the rest of Europe, Germany was seized by a frenzy of organisation and planning which was in tune with Karl Schiller’s rationalisation of economic policy. The adoption of Keynesian doctrine was a logical corollary of the spirit of the times: faith in the future and in the capacity of men to take control of their own condition.

Brandt was no economic expert, and he counted on the nation’s finances holding out. But reforms are expensive, especially when several are carried out at the same time. Many of his reforms failed due to lack of finance, and not only because each minister demanded significant investment in his or her own area. Clearly, the weak point of Brandt’s policy was that it relied on sustainable growth. The monetary crisis that began in 1971, and the economic crisis that followed the 1973 oil shock, brought dreams of ‘more democracy’ to an abrupt end. Public discourse was overrun with technical reports and specialist economic vocabulary. Problems now had names like ‘inflation’, ‘unemployment’, ‘depression’; they brutally circumscribed a horizon that had until recently seemed limitless. Brandt did not enjoy seeing his social modernisation projects fail in this new reality, with its problems caused by events happening elsewhere. The soft currency that flowed into the Bundesbank’s coffers in exchange for the marks that were so coveted on the market, along with the high price of unemployment and depression, make the economic policies Schiller had implemented under the grand coalition unworkable. Federal Germany had only three main goals: healthy finance, growth and stability. In the ideal situation, according to macroeconomic theoreticians, these goals should miraculously form a ‘magic square’ in which moderate growth, price stability, high levels of employment and a healthy external balance of trade are all in harmony. But the internationalisation of the economy revealed the extent to which national governments were at the mercy of global events. The crisis also heightened internal conflicts within the government; the fiscal reform aiming at a more equitable division of labour failed in 1972, and Schiller resigned from his post as ‘super-minister’ of the economy and finance on 2 July, to be replaced by Helmut Schmidt. Brandt was on his third minister of finance.

He knew that his problems were not totally unrelated to his own character and his management style. Although widely admired abroad, and despite the great moral authority he had in his party and in public opinion, within the SPD Brandt had great difficulty preventing fissures from appearing. He was not an authoritarian leader, which did have certain advantages when it came to encouraging people to speak their minds, making sure everyone was included, and maintaining harmony. He had also managed to bring many intellectuals and artists round to the idea of power. However, his biggest weakness was that he avoided personal confrontation. His plans were undermined by disagreements, particularly within the SPD. Sometimes these were caused by personality clashes or ambition, and sometimes by the increasing ideological differences between the two less and less compatible wings of the party. As well as being chancellor, Brandt was still chairman of the SPD, and it was his responsibility to keep the party together and give it coherence.

The left wing of the party, and especially the young socialists, gave him the most trouble. The opposition were mistaken when they implied that Brandt had opened the doors of power to the 1968 youth movement. There was none of the revolution that was so celebrated by Marxists and Maoists in the model that had converted him to democratic socialism years ago, and was inspired by the reformist socialism of Eduard Bernstein. He was an advocate of evolution rather than revolution:

The SPD is still a reformist party. There is not one single course of action, but several different ones, that will improve the rule of law, create the welfare state, and introduce more democracy to the state and to society [...] Democratic socialism is – I repeat –not a dogma.

That final bit sounds like President Lyndon Johnson in the USA, “We can fight in Vietnam and build the Great Society, at the same time.” We can do it all, there is no need to make difficult choices. Of course, that was wrong. Leaders need to make hard choices. If there was no need of hard choices then there would be no need of leaders.

Above all else, there was a lack of thought about certain specifics here. Everyone wants more democracy, but should that increase be quantitative or qualitative in nature? At what point does society stop asking “Are we doing things right?” and start asking “Are we doing the right things?”

As I’ve mentioned in previous essays, a different system, that allowed more political capital to accumulate in the hands of the forces of change, would have then allowed a new world to be born.

Indulge me for a moment, I’d like to offer an analogy with the history of life on Earth. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the emergence of life, and its earliest diversification.

Especially for progressives, we should not be drawn into the false choice between revolution and evolution, but rather, we should crave the Cambrian Explosion, whose basic force was evolution and whose result was the fastest revolution in the history of life on Earth. For 93 million years, from 634 million years ago to 541 million years ago, strange life forms grew up during the Ediacaran. And then in 5 million years it almost all vanished. Between 545 and 540 million years ago there was an astonishing replacement of one ecosystem with another, larger and more diverse, ecosystem. Nothing else like it has happened before or since.

And what allowed the Cambrian Explosion? A contributing factor was the recent evolution of the Hox genes, which allow the specification of complex body types. In the language of software, the Hox genes are a DSL (domain specific language) that made it much, much easier to describe a vast variety of body types.

The analogy works for politics too. We need a new DSL, a DSL for cultural evolution, a DSL which can then allow the specification of a great variety of new cultures and societies.