Victoria Camps on the Decline of Social Democracy

Victoria Camps has recently published an opinion piece in El País entitled “The Decline of Socialism,” in which she reflects on the loss of historical momentum of European social democracy and on the current difficulties of sustaining an effective politics of equality. Her diagnosis begins from a legitimate concern: the achievements associated with the welfare state—public education, universal healthcare, pensions, and social protection—remain decisive, yet they appear insufficient to address contemporary forms of inequality. Housing, labour precarity, the deterioration of primary care, dependency, the crisis of care, and the vulnerability of broad sections of the young population reveal a growing gap between proclaimed rights and the material conditions necessary to exercise them.

Camps argues that social democracy has not necessarily exhausted its historical potential, but that it has become stalled in a model designed to respond to the challenges of industrial society. She therefore proposes updating the welfare state, shifting it from a merely assistance-based logic towards an “active welfare state,” and directing public policy towards social inclusion, employment, care, and effective equality. Her argument contains a fundamental insight: a just society should not merely prevent people from falling into destitution; it should create the conditions for them to participate genuinely in social life, work with dignity, receive and provide care, build ties, and project an existence not entirely subject to insecurity.

This essay begins by acknowledging that insight. I shall argue, however, that Camps’s explanation reaches a decisive limit when she interprets the crisis of social democracy primarily as a problem of political will, cooperation, institutional effectiveness, and the capacity to translate normative principles into outcomes. The question is not only why governments fail to do what they ought to do, but also which economic, legal, technological, and geopolitical structures restrict in advance the field of what is politically possible. At this point, moral reflection on justice must open itself to a material critique of the relations of power, accumulation, and exclusion that systematically produce what is subsequently presented as a deficit of will, civic-mindedness, or democratic responsibility.

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Victoria Camps presents her proposal as a move beyond the old welfare state. The social democracy of the so-called “thirty glorious years” would have responded to the challenges of industrialisation through universal schooling, public healthcare, pensions, unemployment insurance, and protection against the most basic forms of social insecurity. That model did not exactly fail, but it became trapped in a conception of justice incapable of addressing the problems of our time: inaccessible housing, labour precarity, the fragility of long-term care, educational failure linked to inequality of origin, or the exclusion of those who, though formally protected, are unable to make use of the opportunities available to them.

The move appears reasonable. The point would not be nostalgically to restore the old welfare state, but to update it. Against a form of protection limited to benefits and subsistence, Camps proposes a more active state, oriented towards employment, social inclusion, care, and an equality capable of enabling people not merely to survive, but to exist socially.

Yet a decisive ambiguity emerges here. What Camps describes as a new horizon does not really break with the historical logic of Keynesian social democracy. It extends it. Education, healthcare, pensions, decent work, housing, care, and material security all belong to the same political grammar: the promise that the state can correct the harms and inequalities produced by the capitalist economy through public institutions, redistribution, regulation, and social protection.

There is nothing illegitimate about defending that promise. On the contrary, the achievements of the social state remain non-negotiable. Yet it is problematic to present their updating as though it constituted a sufficient alternative to the present crisis. Camps argues that we should not look nostalgically to the past; nevertheless, her proposal preserves almost intact the fundamental assumption of that past: that capitalism can be durably domesticated by a democratic politics capable of correcting its most destructive social effects.

The difficulty becomes more visible when neoliberalism is described as a mere negation of the social state. Neoliberalism has not eliminated social policy altogether. It has reorganised it. Where the welfare state provided relatively universal rights, the neoliberal state tends to administer harms selectively: conditional benefits, targeted assistance, activation programmes, labour-market inclusion policies, and mechanisms for controlling and managing vulnerable populations. It does not abandon those excluded from the market; it often keeps them in a condition of administered survival.

This is why the opposition between a passive welfare state and an active welfare state is not innocent. It may be necessary for people to gain access to work, housing, care, and effective forms of social participation. But one must ask: inclusion into what? Into what kind of labour market, housing regime, organisation of care, and political economy? If the structures that produce precarity, indebtedness, residential displacement, and dependency remain intact, inclusion risks becoming a more sophisticated form of social readaptation.

The decisive question is not only how to expand or modernise state protection. It is whether social policy can continue to confine itself to repairing the harms produced by an economic order whose reproduction depends precisely on the existence of precarious lives, sacrifice zones, and populations available for subordinated forms of work and care.

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The problem becomes clearer when Camps identifies the main obstacle as a lack of political will. Her conclusion is understandable: we know the new forms of inequality, we possess public institutions capable of intervening, and we retain—at least formally—democratic values robust enough to justify an expansion of rights. What is lacking, then, would be collective resolve, the capacity for agreement, and leaders prepared to translate those principles into effective policies.

But this explanation leaves the decisive question untouched. It is not enough to ask why governments fail to do what they should. We must ask why even governments that seek to expand social rights, regulate markets, or strengthen public protection encounter such persistent limits. Why does housing remain subordinate to financial profitability? Why is decent work becoming an exception or an increasingly fragile promise? Why does care continue to rest on invisible, underpaid work, or work displaced onto households? Why does the ecological transition seem, time and again, to advance at the expense of those with fewer resources and less power to decide?

Democratic will never operates in a vacuum. It acts within constrained budgets, globalised markets, property structures, energy and technological dependencies, international treaties, financial networks, and relations of force that delimit in advance what a government can do without triggering capital flight, a debt crisis, corporate disinvestment, or a rapid loss of competitiveness.

Calling for more courageous governments may be politically necessary. But it cannot replace an analysis of the powers capable of disciplining them. The question is not only which policies should be adopted, but who controls the material conditions that make their adoption possible or impossible: land, housing, credit, energy, food, data, infrastructures, and the logistical networks on which the reproduction of social life depends.

At this point, the crisis of social democracy no longer appears as a mere failure of leadership or institutional imagination. It reveals itself as a deeper crisis: the difficulty democracy faces in intervening effectively in the relations of economic power that restrict its own capacity to decide.

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Here a deeper limitation of much contemporary European moral and political philosophy comes into view. The point is not to deny the importance of the Habermasian tradition or to reduce it mechanically to bureaucracy or proceduralism. Rather, it is to identify a persistent tendency in democratic theory: to think social conflicts primarily as deficits of deliberation, reciprocal recognition, public responsibility, or institutional quality.

Within this framework, moral philosophy performs an indispensable function. It can affirm that no one should lack housing, care, healthcare, or the minimum material conditions required for a dignified life. It can defend solidarity, equality, social justice, and unconditional respect for human dignity. Without such normative language, injustice risks being reduced to a mere conflict of interests or an inevitable consequence of social competition.

But that language alone does not explain why societies with sufficient resources, knowledge, and technical capacities to guarantee those goods continue to produce precarity, indebtedness, residential displacement, institutional abandonment, and residual lives.

The problem begins when structural processes are translated into normative deficits. Where relations of property, dynamics of accumulation, financialisation, the sexual and racial division of labour, coloniality, geopolitical dependence, or technological concentration are at work, moral reflection tends above all to identify a lack of responsibility, the degradation of civic culture, polarisation, corruption, deliberative insufficiency, or the weakening of democratic values.

None of this is false. Corruption exists; polarisation destroys collective capacities; racism, misogyny, and xenophobia cannot be explained simply by economics. But these categories are insufficient to understand why such pathologies become so persistent, why they reactivate even in societies formally committed to equality, and why the most widely accepted democratic principles repeatedly fail to become effective conditions of life.

The limit of ethics does not lie in its concern with justice. It lies in the fact that it often stops at the formulation of criteria of justice and fails to interrogate the historical and material relations that turn those criteria into systematically unfulfilled promises.

The decisive question is no longer only what we ought to do to remedy inequality. It is what kind of social order must produce, administer, and normalise it to continue reproducing itself.

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The crisis of legitimacy of neoliberal democracy does not simply consist in citizens’ distrust of institutions or in political parties’ failure to keep their promises. It consists in a deeper contradiction: contemporary democracies continue formally to affirm political equality, universal dignity, and common citizenship while materially organising inequality, vulnerability, and differential exposure to harm.

Rights remain, but the effective conditions for exercising them are distributed in radically unequal ways. Housing is proclaimed as a right, yet increasingly functions as a financial asset. Employment is presented as a route to social integration, yet large sections of the labour market produce precarity, dependency, and permanent availability. Care is recognised as a collective need, yet continues to rest disproportionately on women, families, and migrant workers. The ecological transition is formulated as a common imperative, yet its costs often fall on those with fewer resources, less mobility, and little capacity to decide.

Democracy promises equality; the economic order unequally distributes time, security, mobility, access to resources, and the very possibility of planning a life. Inequality therefore does not refer only to the quantity of goods that each person possesses. It affects people’s differential capacity to inhabit the world without being permanently exposed to eviction, indebtedness, illness, labour precarity, border violence, or ecological degradation.

The problem is therefore not merely distributive. It is not only that some accumulate too much while others receive too little. It is that certain actors have the power to decide over the material conditions of others’ existence. They decide over land and housing, credit, energy, food, employment, data, infrastructures, and territories that can be turned into sacrifice zones in the name of growth, competitiveness, or profitability.

Inequality is therefore a relation of power. And that relation of power is precisely what a critique limited to deficits of political will or democratic culture leaves unthought.

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At this point, Camps’s reading needs to attend to the perspective emphasised by Enrique Dussel. This is not a matter of mechanically replacing the European tradition of democratic ethics, but of introducing a question that reveals a constitutive opacity in its institutional framework: what happens when a social order operates according to its own procedures, formally observes its rules of legitimacy, and nevertheless systematically produces victims whom it then insists on interpreting from within the immanence of its own totality?

Dussel does not begin by asking how to improve the moral quality of institutions or make inclusion more effective. He begins with exteriority: with that which the social totality cannot fully absorb and which nevertheless constitutes a condition of its own reproduction. Exteriority does not simply designate an “outside” of the system, nor a population accidentally excluded from it. It names the position of those who reveal the material and ethical limit of an order that presents itself as rational, democratic, or just.

The victim, then, is not the individual who has failed adequately to integrate into society. The victim is the one who reveals, through harm, vulnerability, or expulsion, that the normality of the system may depend on the sustained production of subordination, precarity, and surplusness. Such a person may be formally included—working, voting, consuming, receiving public assistance—yet remain positioned in exteriority with respect to the effective conditions for reproducing life.

This shift is decisive. Camps still thinks, fundamentally, from within the institutional totality: it must be corrected, updated, made more equitable, more effective, and more responsive. Dussel compels us to think from what that totality fails adequately to recognise: those unable to make use of the opportunities offered to them because they reach them already damaged by poverty, racialisation, precarity, territorial displacement, border violence, economic dependency, or the destruction of their material conditions of life.

The question is no longer only how to reintegrate those who have been left out. It becomes: what kind of exteriority does the social order we inhabit produce to guarantee its own reproduction? Which bodies does it render available, which territories does it degrade, which populations does it keep in precarity, which forms of life does it make residual, and which harms must it normalise to keep functioning?

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Following an idea popularised by Pierre Rosanvallon, Camps proposes a transition from a passive welfare state to an active welfare state. The intuition is suggestive: it is not enough to sustain subsistence through benefits. People must be able to work, participate in common life, provide and receive care, build ties, have time at their disposal, and gain access to effective conditions of autonomy.

But there is one question this proposal cannot avoid: inclusion into what?

Into a labour market that requires precarity to sustain levels of profitability? Into a housing system that expels young people and turns the home into a vehicle of financial accumulation? Into a care regime that rests on the invisible labour of women and migrants? Into an economy that shifts ecological costs onto peripheral territories and populations with less political power?

Inclusion can be a real achievement. But it can also become a form of readaptation: those who have been expelled are helped to recover a place within the very order that produced their expulsion, without transforming the relations that made it possible. The issue is not only that such inclusion may occur under subordinated conditions. It is also that the piecemeal inclusion of some can function as evidence of the totality’s legitimacy: it allows the system to present itself as open, reparable, and inclusive, while the mechanisms that continue to produce precarity, expulsion, and exteriority remain intact.

For this reason, exteriority cannot be reduced to social exclusion understood as a lack of integration. It names a more radical position: one in which certain lives, bodies, territories, and peoples are differentially exposed to harm because their vulnerability forms part of the material conditions for reproducing the social order.

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European social democracy was built upon a specific historical articulation of capitalism, democracy, industrial growth, and the regulatory state. Its achievements were real: public education, universal healthcare, pensions, collective bargaining, unemployment protection, and the expansion of social rights. But they did not arise in a vacuum, nor did they respond solely to a moral victory of equality over the market.

They depended on very specific historical conditions: strong fiscal capacity on the part of states, powerful trade unions, relatively stable employment, industrial expansion, abundant and cheap energy, sustained productivity growth, and Europe’s privileged position within the world economy. The welfare state was, in this sense, a historically situated solution to the tensions between capitalist accumulation, class conflict, and democratic legitimacy.

This in no way invalidates its achievements. It would be absurd to renounce public healthcare, universal education, pensions, or social protection. But it requires us to abandon two illusions: nostalgia for a pure restoration of the old social-democratic compromise, and the idea that the recovery of political will would suffice to reactivate it under present conditions.

The conditions of that equilibrium have changed radically. Financialisation, productive globalisation, the fragmentation of labour, the commodification of housing, corporate concentration, technological dependence, the climate crisis, and the digitisation of social life have reduced and reconfigured the effective scope for state intervention. To this must be added a far-reaching geopolitical mutation: Europe’s relative decline in centrality, competition among great powers, unstable supply chains, struggles over energy, critical minerals, food, and technological capacities, along with the increasing militarisation of borders and international relations.

It is not simply that governments no longer wish to intervene. They intervene within an order whose reproduction depends on transnational economic powers, financial circuits, private infrastructures, global logistical networks, and geopolitical hierarchies that far exceed the national scale. The promise of a social democracy able to redistribute wealth and security internally thus becomes inseparable from the question of the external, territorial, and global conditions upon which that redistribution rests.

For this reason, the current crisis of social democracy cannot be explained merely as a loss of will, leadership, or institutional imagination. It expresses a deeper crisis of legitimacy: neoliberal democracy’s inability materially to guarantee what it continues to promise normatively.

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The critique extends beyond Camps. It concerns a significant part of liberal-democratic proposals and progressive voluntarisms that locate the core of the crisis in political culture, the quality of public debate, civic education, polarisation, corruption, disinformation, or hate speech.

All this matters. Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, authoritarianism, and punitivism are neither mere epiphenomena of the economy nor illusions that can be dissolved through a better distribution of income. They have their own genealogies, affective sedimentations, institutional forms, and specific capacities for mobilisation. They must be opposed politically, culturally, and legally.

But it is insufficient to treat them as though they were merely failures of consciousness, cultural deviations, or moral pathologies correctable through pedagogy, discursive inclusion, better public manners, or abstract appeals to coexistence. Mentalities do not float in a vacuum. They are formed, intensified, and rendered effective within concrete material conditions, social relations, and institutions.

Xenophobia can acquire force where housing, employment, or public services appear as scarce and competitive resources. Punitivism can thrive in contexts of social insecurity, the disintegration of collective ties, and institutional abandonment. Misogyny can be reinforced where care work remains invisible, underpaid, and unequally distributed. Polarisation may express material conflicts concerning property, territory, labour, access to resources, and the reproduction of life.

Liberal-democratic progressivism usually responds to these problems with moral pedagogy: we must educate better, promote dialogue, combat hate speech, regenerate institutions, increase empathy, defend coexistence, and improve the quality of public debate. All these tasks are necessary. But they do not by themselves alter the relations of property, labour, care, energy, technology, and accumulation that produce the conditions on which such pathologies feed.

The point is not to oppose cultural transformation and material transformation as though one had to choose between them. The point is to understand that a democratic politics incapable of intervening in the material conditions of insecurity, dependency, and social competition leaves intact the ground on which authoritarianism, xenophobia, and resentment can continue to reproduce themselves.

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All this requires thinking beyond the moral administration of harms. It requires defending public healthcare, universal education, pensions, and social services, but also interrogating the relations of power that limit their scope: the commodification of housing, financial power, the privatisation of care, technological concentration, energy dependence, the colonial hierarchies of the world economy, and ecological destruction.

Justice cannot be reduced either to the redistribution of goods or to the formal expansion of rights. It must include the transformation of the relations that determine who can live securely, who is exposed to precarity, and which populations bear the costs of social reproduction. It is not enough to incorporate those who had been left outside. We must ask whether such incorporation alters the relations that produced their exclusion or, on the contrary, reintegrates them in a subordinated manner and turns that reintegration into a new source of legitimacy for the totality.

From this perspective, housing is not only an unfulfilled right: it is also a field of financial accumulation and rent extraction. Care is not merely a lack of public services: it constitutes a central dimension of social reproduction, historically rendered invisible and offloaded onto feminised, racialised, and migrant bodies. Youth precarity is not merely a failure of employment policy: it expresses an economic model that makes labour power more flexible, fragmented, and cheap. The ecological crisis is not simply a lack of environmental awareness: it derives from a form of production and accumulation that treats nature as an available reserve and peripheral territories as sacrifice zones.

The political question therefore ceases to be only how to restore trust in democracy or renew the socialist project. It becomes: what material, institutional, and geopolitical transformations would be necessary for democracy to cease being a normative promise compatible with the systematic production of victims and residual forms of life?

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The moral and social philosophy articulated by Victoria Camps in her article remains indispensable. Without it, we could not name injustice, defend the dignity of victims, or resist the normalisation of exclusion. Nor could we sustain a politics of equality, care, and social rights without normative criteria capable of distinguishing the just from the intolerable.

But we need to shift the axis of the discussion. The problem is not only that institutions fail, governments lack will, or democratic culture has weakened. We need to recognise that the capitalist system, in its different historical configurations, produces victims not merely as an accidental consequence of its inadequacies, but as a requirement of its processes of accumulation, expansion, and reproduction.

Precarity, indebtedness, residential displacement, the subordination of care, ecological destruction, the racialisation of labour, and the transformation of entire territories into sacrifice zones are not mere external anomalies of an order that otherwise functions adequately. They are concrete forms through which that order distributes costs, extracts value, secures profitability, and sustains the material conditions of its continuity.

For this reason, the question cannot be limited to what we ought to do to repair harms, expand rights, or recover trust in democracy. It must also address the relations of property, power, labour, energy, technology, and geopolitical dependence that ensure the systematic reproduction of those harms.

Finally, there is a claim made by Camps that deserves attention because it concentrates the limit of her argument. Faced with the crisis of social democracy and even of liberalism, she maintains that it is difficult to imagine another frame of reference from which one might continue to believe in the values of freedom and equality. The statement seems prudent. But it also expresses a closure: freedom and equality are conceived almost exclusively through the European liberal-democratic tradition and the historical institutions that tradition has produced.

The difficulty of thinking from another framework may not be merely intellectual. It may express a deeper resistance to interrogating the historical and material conditions upon which the European promise of progress, citizenship, and welfare was sustained. That promise produced real achievements that must be defended. But it was also intertwined with relations of exploitation, colonial appropriation, the international division of labour, the subordination of care, and the externalisation of ecological costs onto other bodies, territories, and peoples.

Perhaps we do not simply need a corrected political liberalism, a more effective representative democracy, or a more socially sensitive capitalism. Perhaps we need to ask whether the concrete historical forms of freedom, equality, and democracy that we have inherited can be realised without transforming the social relations of production and appropriation that turn one part of humanity into a condition of possibility for the security of another.

The issue is not to abandon the democratic promise. It is to decide whether we are prepared to detach it from the relations of exploitation, dispossession, and sacrifice that have historically limited its scope. A democracy that continues to produce residual lives while proclaiming itself universal will not have overcome its crisis of legitimacy. It will merely have learned to administer it in a more refined language.

So long as politics confines itself to morally managing the harms of the existing order, it will continue to call a crisis of values what is also a crisis of legitimacy, a material crisis of democracy, and, perhaps more profoundly, a crisis of civilisation.

Camps, V. (2026, July 2). El ocaso del socialismo [The decline of socialism]. El País. https://elpais.com/opinion/2026-07-02/el-ocaso-del-socialismo.htmlhttps://elpais.com/opinion/2026-07-02/el-ocaso-del-socialismo.html

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