The People's Stage in Imperial Germany: Social Democracy and Culture 1890-1914

The clash between German Social Democracy--the party, intellectuals and workers--and the German Imperial State was played out in the Freie Volksbahne (Free People's Theatre) founded by intellectuals to energise working class political awareness of drama with a political and social cutting edge. It fell foul of state censorship, lost its bite, yet prospered.

Social democracy and market reform in Australia and New Zealand

Social democratic governments in Australia and New Zealand adopted policies of radical free-market reform, including financial deregulation, privatization, and public-sector reform in the 1980s. Because of the absence of institutional obstacles to government action, reform was faster and more comprehensive in New Zealand than in Australia. The New Zealand reforms were associated with increasing inequality and generally poor economic outcomes. There is nothing in the New Zealand experience to support the view that radical free-market economic policies are consistent with social democratic welfare policies or with social democratic values of concern for the disadvantaged, The Australian reforms were less radical, and were accompanied by some refurbishment of the welfare state. Economic performance did nor improve, as anticipated by advocates of reform, but was considerably better than that of New Zealand.

The genome of the leaf-cutting ant Acromyrmex echinatior suggests key adaptations to advanced social life and fungus farming.

We present a high-quality (>100× depth) Illumina genome sequence of the leaf-cutting ant Acromyrmex echinatior, a model species for symbiosis and reproductive conflict studies. We compare this genome with three previously sequenced genomes of ants from different subfamilies and focus our analyses on aspects of the genome likely to be associated with known evolutionary changes. The first is the specialized fungal diet of A. echinatior, where we find gene loss in the ant's arginine synthesis pathway, loss of detoxification genes, and expansion of a group of peptidase proteins. One of these is a unique ant-derived contribution to the fecal fluid, which otherwise consists of "garden manuring" fungal enzymes that are unaffected by ant digestion. The second is multiple mating of queens and ejaculate competition, which may be associated with a greatly expanded nardilysin-like peptidase gene family. The third is sex determination, where we could identify only a single homolog of the feminizer gene. As other ants and the honeybee have duplications of this gene, we hypothesize that this may partly explain the frequent production of diploid male larvae in A. echinatior. The fourth is the evolution of eusociality, where we find a highly conserved ant-specific profile of neuropeptide genes that may be related to caste determination. These first analyses of the A. echinatior genome indicate that considerable genetic changes are likely to have accompanied the transition from hunter-gathering to agricultural food production 50 million years ago, and the transition from single to multiple queen mating 10 million years ago.

A crisis of social democracy : organized labour and the NDP in an era of neoliberalism

The NDP was founded out of the ashes of the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation to cooperate with the Canadian Labour Congress to become the 'political arm of organized labour' in Canada. The NDP has long claimed they are the party which represents the policy goals of organized labour in Canada: that the NDP alone will fight for trade union rights, and will fight for Canadian workers. Divergent Paths is an examination of the links between the labour movement and the ND P in an era ofneo-liberalism. Provincial NDP governments have become increasingly neoliberal in their ideological orientation, and have often proved to be no friend to the labour movement when they hold office. The Federal party has never held power, nor have they ever formed the Official Opposition. This thesis charts the progress of the federal NDP as they become more neoliberal from 1988 to 2006, and shows how this trend effects the links between the NDP and labour. Divergent Paths studies each federal election from 1988 to 2006, looking at the interactions between Labour and the NDP during these elections. Elections provide critical junctions to study discourse - party platforms, speeches, and other official documents can be used to examine discourse. Extensive newspaper searches were used to follow campaign events and policy speeches. Studying the party's discourse can be used to determine the ideological orientation of the party itself: the fact that the party's discourse has become neoliberal is a sure sign that the party itself is neoliberal. The NDP continues to drive towards the centre of the political spectrum in an attempt to gain multi-class support. The NDP seems more interested in gaining seats at any cost, rather then promoting the agenda of Labour. As the party attempts to open up to more multi-class support, Labour becomes increasingly marginalised in the party. A rift which arguably started well before the 1988 election was exacerbated during that election; labour encouraged the NDP to campaign solely on the issue of Free Trade, and the NDP did not. The 1993 election saw the rift between the two grow even further as the Federal NDP suffered major blowbacks from the actions of the Ontario NDP. The 1997 and 2000 elections saw the NDP make a deliberate move to the centre of the political spectrum which increasingly marginalised labour. In the 2004 election, Jack Layton made no attempt to move the party back to the left; and in 2006 the link between labour and the NDP was perhaps irreparably damaged when the CAW endorsed the Liberal party in a strategic voting strategy, and the CLC did not endorse the NDP. The NDP is no longer a reliable ally of organized labour. The Canadian labour movement must decide wether the NDP can be 'salvaged' or if the labour movement should end their alliance with the NDP and engage in a new political project.

Walter Friedländer (1891-1984) – Between Social Democracy and Social Darwinism

If the profession of social work is to have a future we must know where it came from, and the series of portraits of our pioneers is one of the paths into the origins of that profession. I feel grateful to the publishers for this online-journal and also honoured to be asked to continue the series on pioneers in social work. I gladly comply because, in connection with my research on Alice Salomon and other social workers who were expelled from Germany and other Nazi-occupied territories (Wieler1989 and 1995) I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting and interviewing Walter Friedländer shortly before he passed away. It is years ago that I visited him in his home among stacks of books and piles of papers. My memories are vivid. I still see his sparkling eyes and hear his soft voice with a very heavy German accent. I was most impressed by his memory of historical events and people which, it seemed, only a large hard-drive could retain these days. Now, I wish I had asked more questions but instead, we will have to rely largely on primary and secondary literature and box upon box of archival materials. I draw heavily on the comprehensive German and Jewish Intellectual Emigré Collection (http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/ger003.htm) which consists of nearly 50 cubic feet and another collection of the German Central Institute („Deutsches Zentralinstitut für Soziale Fragen-DZI“) in Berlin (www.dzi.de). Some of the more current archival materials were lost in a flood, and much of Friedländer’s early memorabilia up to 1933 was lost in Germany. There are also internet resources with widely differing information. I hope that I will not have overlooked too much in order to do justice to this remarkable pioneer and colleague. In order to appreciate and pay tribute to Walter Friedländer and his contributions we will have to reconsider the historical and international context of more than the 93 years of his life span: the German Monarchy, the Weimar Republic, Nazi-Fascism, Swiss, French and American exile and numerous visits to other countries.

Social Democracy, Globalization and Governance: Why is there no European Left Program in the EU? CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 00.6, April 2000

This paper addresses globalization and governance in the EU by attempting to generate some plausible hypotheses that might explain the policy choices of the 12 out of 15 European democratic left governments. With all of the discussion in recent years of a democratic deficit, and then need to maintain a "social Europe," why have these governments not produced more explicit left-wing policies? It suggests three possible hypotheses to account for this apparently mysterious outcome. Hypothesis #1: They want to but they can't. Hypothesis #2: They don't want to because they aren't really left anymore. Hypothesis #3: They could, but they all are suffering from a fundamental failure of imagination. The paper explores each of these hypotheses in two ways. First it examines the initial years of the Schröder government in Germany apparently, pursuing each of these three hypotheses and different times during this period. Then it looks more systematically and comparatively and each of the three hypotheses by including analysis both of Germany and several other EU member states. The larger goal of this work is to provoke discussion and research on what role left political movements can actually play. Is it even reasonable to expect such a group of nation states to develop innovative forms of cross-national governance? Or are new and/or revised forms of representation and governance beyond traditional nation-state models.

The impossibility of social democracy, being a supplement to "The quintessence of socialism",

"Translated from the fourth German Edition, by A. C. Morant."