Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform

Even in its heyday, the welfare state notably failed to alter inequalities of condition by class, sex, gender, race, and age, and was, in fact, more successful in redistributing dependence among the broadly defined working class than it ever was in socially redistributing the wealth extracted by the capitalist class. Most tellingly, social democracy utterly failed to "decommodify" social relations, even between the state and the populace. The real limitations of the social democratic project in the "Western nations" has clearly facilitated, for [Gary Teeple], the rapid rise to political-economic and ideological hegemony of an alternative, globalizing neo-liberal reform project since the 1970s; and Teeple argues cogently why it is actually incapable of offering a serious response to globalizing neo-liberalism. Teeple's discussion of both the social democratic and neo-liberal projects from the perspective of the "Western nations" is as one-sided as much of the so called "development" literature's one-sided focus on the "the others." His "Western" focus blinds him to a critique of the imperialist roots of social democracy and to the anti-imperialist and socialist struggles that accompanied that social democracy in its post-World War II heyday. This blindness allows him to too easily forget that neo-liberalism as a project was first introduced and honed by the transnational capitalist class and its central states in those "other" places like Chile since 1973, and that, in such places, it has often required immense military/state might to introduce and sustain.