Once again I take a precious cue from Avanti!, commenting the Uil Congress. “Leaving no one behind, leaving no one alone” is the essence of democratic and liberal socialism. How to try to achieve this goal?
Combining growth with the equitable redistribution of resources represents the most effective method for not mortifying the former and for directing it towards social justice. And this acquires even more value in a phase of international crisis with a thousand faces: economic, ecological, health, military.
The second part of the sentence – “leave no one alone” – has an even more extensive and general value than the first. For example, it means not humiliating those who commit themselves and obtain results (the “merits”), leaving them to fend for themselves. And it has to do with the strategies aimed at making everyone feel less alone: the immigrant (perhaps second or third generation), or the person with a sexual orientation or gender identity other than the more frequent ones, or individuals and groups that express a religious belief that does not conform to the more widespread one. Not to mention the sick or the disabled.
These are questions that social democracy (the social democracies) have been dealing with for decades now, with sometimes flattering, sometimes bad or mediocre results. Not only; as a non-economist and non-expert in economic policy, I know in any case that it is a little easier to reconcile the reasons for development with those for equity in times of fat cows. If there is stagnation or recession, even the most cautious and weighted proposal for the redistribution of wealth can evoke the ghost (the famous specter indicated at the beginning of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto) of expropriation.
The liberal socialist positions, for example, have had a maieutic function with respect to the Democratic Party, however remaining minority or marginal. It is often noted how the (post) communist and (post) Christian Democrat traditions have prevailed over them. I would add something else: as already in the PDS, also in the Pd there is a tendency to decline the idea of the left now towards ethical issues and the freedoms of individuals, naturally full of social implications (the “mass radical party” of which the philosopher Augusto Del Noce), now towards a “Catholic”, almost “neo-Guelph” vision, favored in recent years by the openness and lucidity of Pope Francis.
Well, these are tendencies that betray precisely the weakness, even in the Democratic Party, of the liberal-socialist culture, albeit often referred to in words, and more generally social-democratic. Weakness in turn accentuated, so it seems to me, by the dispersion in a thousand rivulets of those who refer to it. I am not referring so much to the heirs of the PSI and their diaspora, as to the same thinkers of a liberal socialist matrix. Placed in dissimilar, if not opposite, positions with respect to critical issues such as peace and war, economic policy choices, environmental sustainability and so on.
And here there is work and construction to be done, in the awareness that it is an uphill journey.