What is Social Democracy?

At the close of the 19th century, the European labor movement spawned Marxist political parties – notably in Germany and Austria – that called themselves “social democratic.” In a sense, this was to show alignment with the failed revolutions of 1848, and Marx himself in the 18th Brumaire describes the political alliance of the middle and working classes that arose from that period: The “petty bourgeois saw that they were badly rewarded after the June days of 1848, that their material interests were imperiled, and that the democratic guarantees which were to insure the effectuation of these interests were called in question by the counterrevolution. Accordingly they came closer to the workers.”

The emphasis on “democracy” in social democracy referred at least historically to the campaign to extend suffrage and to invest real power in elected legislatures. The goal was (and remains) the extension of democracy into all dimensions of social life. As these parties became national contenders in electoral politics, there emerged a debate over the value of “extra-parliamentary” action – i.e., mass strikes, confronting fascists, etc. This question only became more acute after the 1917 victory of the revolutionary Bolsheviks in Russia. In 1926, leading Austrian Social Democrat Otto Bauer called for only “defensive violence,” a purely reactive strategy that saw direct action only as a last resort. In 1911, the sociologist and anarcho-syndicalist Robert Michels formulated the “iron law of oligarchy” after studying social democratic parties, arguing that organizations inevitably bred division between the rank-and-file members and the elite oligarchs, who acted no different than the heads of conservative parties.

As a consequence of electoral politics, social democratic parties tended to stress immediate reforms rather than the long-term goal of transitioning from capitalism to socialism, and often made overtures to groups outside the working class to expand their vote share. They nevertheless continued to present themselves as so hostile to the status quo as to be revolutionary – at least until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when the vast majority of social democratic parties opted to support their respective nations in the war, regarded by radical leftists as a conflict between repressive capitalist empires. This led to the Lenin and later Stalin regimes denouncing social democratic parties as not genuinely socialist in nature and even to labeling such parties “the moderate wing of fascism.” Furthermore, Rosa Luxemburg – who criticized both the centralist Bolsheviks and reformist social democracy in her own Germany – was killed by the German Social Democratic government in 1919 after she threw her support behind a mass strike (the sort of direct action most social democrats rebuked).

Since World War II and the Cold War, most social democratic parties in Europe have jettisoned Marxism and socialism, recreating themselves as parties of the labor movement into more generic, center-left groups (see the German SPD since 1959 and the UK Labour Party since 1994). Such parties tend to advocate either something akin to the “Golden Age of Capitalism” of the 1950s-60s or simply a continuation of the neoliberal, technocratic apolitical managerial state, but with more attention to social issues. In underdeveloped countries, the pain inflicted in the 1980s through structural adjustment packages and the resulting political fallout led to a renaissance of social democratic victories, especially in Latin America, where a “pink wave” found electoral success in the 1990s. Since 2008, in the wake of the world financial crisis and as criticism of globalization becomes more widespread, some social democratic parties are becoming closer to their historic identities, renewing links with trade unions or re-adopting rhetoric about redistributing political and economic power. It remains to be seen whether this is a meaningful trend or a passing phase of left-wing populism. In virtually every social democratic party today there is a strong core of centrists who favor the status quo and oppose a return to more explicitly anti-capitalist politics.

On the one hand, Engels in particular endorsed democracy as means of realizing socialism, and referred to the Paris Commune (which had elections) as the embodiment of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Moreover, many of the reforms of the 20th century that extended rights and freedoms to workers were a result of social democratic parties. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether social democratic parties can truly achieve a transition to socialism while working within bourgeois institutions, and whether critical parts of the electorate could ever throw their support behind such a revolutionary break. After all, even the elections of the Paris Commune only took place after a violent break with the French government after it tried to impose its authority in Paris. Finally, events like the murder of Luxemburg demonstrate that social democratic parties, when push has come to shove, have opted to use violence against revolutionary threats to the status quo while disdaining revolutionary violence against the ruling class.

