Rediscovering Social Democracy

...Marxism offered the most powerful challenge from the left, and during the second half of the century it gathered many adherents and spawned its own political movement...

...Activists across the continent adopted his themes, but it was only in Scandinavia, and in Sweden in particular, that this new approach was embraced wholeheartedly by a unified party...

...and in Sweden, the Social Democratic Party (SAP) initiated the single most ambitious attempt to reshape capitalism from within...

...Keeping these two criteria in mind allows us to understand why the much ballyhooed "third way" promoted by Tony Blair, Anthony Giddens, and others is less a continuation of social democracy than a radical break with it...

...In contrast to orthodox Marxism's passivity and classical liberalism's laissez-faire, social democracy argued for the primacy of politics and was willing to use the state to control, or at least direct, the market...

...Although revisionists were pointedly rebuked at the International's Amsterdam convention in 1904, the movement continued to grow as the realities of European political and economic life made orthodox belief increasingly difficult...

...Right-wing proREDISCOVERING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY tests against capitalism's atomization, amorality, and materialism had been growing since the end of the nineteenth century, but the war gave them a mass base...

...social democrats are basically socialists without the courage of their revolutionary convictions...

...Many West European governments were able to achieve this reconciliation during the postwar era through a combination of traditional welfare state policies and active (Keynesian) management of national economies...

...Everything seemed fine on the surface, but beneath it the intellectual and theoretical foundations erected by Bernstein, de Man, and other revisionist and social democratic thinkers were being eroded through ignorance and neglect...

...Very few people, even among its own members, could give a coherent definition of the movement's nature or goals...

...Mainstream acceptance of many social democratic ideas could not help but breed a certain complacency on the part of movement theorists and activists...

...Triumph and Amnesia By the end of the Second World War, the practical policies favored by social democrats were so clearly seen as the most sensible way to tame the vicious aspects of free-market capitalism that they were adopted by a wide range of political parties...

...indeed, he believed that during the late nineteenth century it was becoming increasingly complex and adaptable...

...These days, having been abused by friends and foes alike over the years, the term "social democracy" is more an epithet or a banner than a meaningful designation...

...In many parts of Western Europe, liberalism appeared as a progressive and even revolutionary force, promising to break down the remaining structures of the old regime and replace them with a system based on individualism, rationalism, and permanent economic progress...

...Indeed, social democracy emerged from similar debates within the international socialist movement a century ago...

...Similarly, one of the SAP's economic theorists, Ernst Wigforss, declared, "We social democrats cannot accept a system where during all times, even the best, up to 10 percent of the workers DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 69 REDISCOVERING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY must be unemployed and during worse times even more...

...By the start of the postwar era, many of the pioneering activists and intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s had either died or emigrated...

...Then as now, economic globalization was bringing the world together and generating both unprecedented prosperity and social discontent...

...At the turn of the century, large numbers in the middle classes and peasantry were feeling economically threatened and politically frustrated...

...Applying the Lessons of the Past A re-examination of social democracy's past is a necessary prelude to discussion of its future...

...Whether DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 71 REDISCOVERING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY one agrees or not, it is clear that as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social democrats need to recapture the theme of communal solidarity from the populist right...

...Others, not willing to accept the violence or elitism of such a course, chose to revamp the socialist program so as to attract the support of a majority of society...

...He declared that "the basis of the home is community and togetherness" and stressed that social democracy strove to "break down the barriers that separate citizens...

...As a result, socialist parties and the Second International were consumed by the "revisionist controversy...

...Concerned about the power and appeal of the right, many revisionists argued that clinging to the orthodox Marxist program would doom the democratic left to oblivion...

...The former, the leading interpreter of Marx's thought in the generation after Engels's death, espoused a deterministic and scientific view of socialism...

...Bernstein's loss of belief in the inevitability of socialism led to his rejection of one of the main pillars of orthodoxy—historical materialism— and to a new appreciation of the potential for human will and political action...

...Bernstein's apostasy began when he saw that many orthodox Marxist predictions were not being fulfilled...

...Rosa Luxemburg, for example—perhaps Bernstein's most vehement and insightful critic—summed up the heretical implications of his views when she noted that socialism was "scientific" rather than "utopian" because economic developments were leading inevitably to capitalism's collapse...

...These democratic revisionists rejected the pseudo-scientific and materialist justifications of socialism proffered by orthodox Marxists and called for a rediscovery of socialism's moral roots, for an emphasis on the ideals underpinning the original project...

...In contrast to Marxism's focus on the proletariat and classical liberalism's focus on the individual, social democracy appealed to the ordinary or little people, the community, and the common good...

...The Origins The first half of the nineteenth century was the golden age of liberalism, which emerged alongside the industrial revolution as the first modern political and economic ideology...

...Although their ideas and actions often emerged independently and differed according to local context, the revisionists shared an emphasis on the desirability rather than the necessity of socialism, on morality and ethics as opposed to science and materialism, and on human will and cross-class cooperation rather than irresistible economic forces and inevitable class conflict...

...But historically, social democrats accepted or tolerated the market only because of its ability to provide the material basis upon which the good life can be built, and remained unwilling to recognize its primacy in social life...

...According to Kautsky, the role of socialists was not to argue for the moral superiority of their views but rather to recognize the causal and "objective" nature of material reality...

...Assimilation, as every minority group knows, is a double-edged sword...

...This convergence around the social democratic program created dangers for the movement because it removed the key source of its distinctive appeal...

...Underneath the confusion, however, two broad views can be discerned...

...To develop such a program they returned to the revisionist themes of a generation before: the primacy of politics, the importance of morality, and the value of cross-class cooperation...

...Those debates have been forgotten or misunderstood, and that's why many contemporary discussions of social democracy are so superficial and intellectually impoverished...

...That is why one must turn to the Swedish case to observe the full dimensions, and potential, of the social democratic experiment...

...From Revisionism to Social Democracy In the years leading up to the First World War, the revisionists' rejection of both historical materialism and class struggle intensified, and the gulf between them and their orthodox colleagues deepened...

...He argued that especially since the war, a natural community of interest had arisen between workers and other social groups, and his Plan was therefore explicitly designed to appeal to "all classes of the population suffering from the present economic distress and to all men of good will...

...Where orthodox Marxists and classical liberals preached passivity in the face of economic catastrophe, the new, truly "social democratic" leftists fought for programs that would use the power of the state to tame the capitalist system...

...They thus came to champion a real "third way" between laissezfaire liberalism and soviet communism based on a belief that political forces must be able to triumph over economic ones...

...During the 1932 election campaign, for example, a leading party paper proclaimed, "Humanity carries its destiny in its own hands...

...These observations reinforced Bernstein's opposition to the view that socialism would emerge only after capitalism's collapse, and he argued that it could and should be reformed...

...Another source of opposition came from the sense that orthodox Marxism had failings not merely as a guide to history, but also as a guide to constructive political action...

...The story of social democracy in the 1950s and 1960s is that of a movement undermined REDISCOVERING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY by its own success...

...Yet Marx's thought contained important gaps and discrepancies...

...All the features of his critique were brought forward in other West European countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...

...REGARDLESS of the specific policies they advocated, one thing that joined all budding interwar social democrats was a rejection of the passivity and economic determinism of orthodox Marxism and a belief in the need to use state power to tame capitalism...

...But Bernstein did not stop with his rejection of historical materialism...

...They must aim, in other words, to reconcile their commitment to a market economy with their rejection of a market society...

...By the end of the century, however, opposition to both economic determinism and political passivity was growing on the left...

...By the mid-1930s, therefore, the democratic strand of revisionism had blossomed into a powerful and creative political movement all its own...

...The history of social democracy is marked by the desire to find an alternative to the individualism of classical liberalism and the class struggle of orthodox Marxism...

...The irony of the postwar era would be that just as these policies came to be widely accepted, many social democrats forgot why they had championed them in the first place...

...72 n DISSENT / Fall 2000...

...He argued, for example, that capitalism was not leading to an increasing concentration of wealth and the immiseration of society...

...Some of these policies have declined in efficacy over time, but this is no reason for the goal to be abandoned...

...In his view, the prospects for socialism depended "not on the decrease but on the increase of . . . wealth," and on the ability of socialists to come up with "positive suggestions for reform," capable of spurring fundamental change...

...They argued that the market's anarchic and destructive powers could be fettered at the same time that its ability to produce unprecedented material bounty was exploited...

...These oversights were exacerbated by the increasing materialism and determinism of Marx's thought and the tendency of his followers to emphasize just these aspects of Marxism...

...What's missing is a blueprint, a movement, and leaders who know what they are about...

...These themes were defended within all socialist parties: in Belgium, Holland, and France, Hendrik de Man and his Plan du Travail found energetic champions...

...The argument gave social democrats a rationale for using political power to control the development of capitalism, while the appeal embodied the norms of national solidarity and cooperation that lay at the heart of their worldview...

...In selling this program to the electorate, especially during the depression, the SAP stressed its activism and commitment to the common good...

...Apprehending the true nature of this ideology, however, requires returning to the circumstances of its birth...

...De Man argued for an activist depressionfighting strategy, an evolutionary transformation of capitalism, and a focus on the control rather than the ownership of capital...

...The second view, often held by supporters, sees the movement as an effort to implement particular policies or uphold certain values...

...So, Marx neglected politics, even as he devoted immense effort to philosophy, sociology, and economics...

...First, in order to be truly social democratic, a contemporary political program must be committed to the primacy of politics...

...Activists in other parts of Europe echoed the argument...

...The result was that while in countries such as Germany and Italy the populist right assumed the mantle of activism and communal solidarity, in Sweden it was the social democrats who became the champions of the "little people," "one with the nation...

...Once again, de Man was a key figure...

...Some activists, like Lenin, felt that this achievement could be imposed by force, and set out to spur history along through the politico-military efforts of a revolutionary vanguard...

...Supporters of the "third way" want to retain some of the movement's communitarian aspects while rejecting the idea that market forces need to be, and can be, redirected or even overruled in the service of fundamental social goals...

...The first is that globalization is creating a fundamentally new environment for leaders and publics, imposing burdens and constraining choices...

...They agreed with Karl Polanyi's argument in The Great Transformation that although capitalism had unleashed hitherto unimagined productive powers, some sort of shelter had to be erected so that societies and individuals could weather the gales of economic, social, and political change...

...In the context of the interwar years and the Great Depression, this meant first and foremost using political forces to control economic ones...

...The irony here is that the contemporary period resembles in important ways the one in which the movement emerged a century ago...

...We refuse to admit that this is necessary and natural despite how [many] people come armed with theories stating that this must be so...

...Orthodox Marxism offered only a counsel of passivity: wait for the "contradictions" within capitalism to bring the system down...

...Bernstein argued that there was a natural community of interest between workers and the many other men and women who suffered from the injustices of the capitalist system...

...He urged socialists to ground their appeals in "the feeling of common humanity" and a "recognition of social interdependence...

...In Germany and Austria, reformers advocated government intervention in the economy and proto-Keynesian stimulation programs...

...Each view contains some truth, but both miss the larger picture...

...These positions not only helped the SAP to form a majority government through an alliance with the peasantry, but enabled it to reap political rewards from the eventual economic recovery...

...Meanwhile, the SAP's leader, Per Albin Hansson, was popularizing his theme of Sweden as the folkhemmet or "people's home...

...If, however, "one admits with Bernstein that capitalist development does not move in the direction of its own ruin, then socialism ceases to be an objective necessity and instead becomes a 'mere ideal.' " She was, of course, absolutely right, although it would take another generation of war and depression for the fundamentally new political movement based on revisionism to come into its own...

...SHERI BERMAN is an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University and the author of The Social Democratic Moment: Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe...

...The final break came in the 1920s and 1930s as European socialists, now often the dominant parties in their national political systems, confronted the challenges of a socio-economic landscape transformed by the First World War...

...They proposed instead a program that would tap into the needs of the mass of disoriented and discontented Europeans...

...During the interwar years, the Swedish SAP developed a comprehensive economic program designed to harness the powers of the market and reshape the Swedish polity...

...Ironically, however, the very conditions that lead so many observers to proclaim social democracy's demise provide an excellent context for its re-examination and possibly even its resurgence, albeit in somewhat different form...

...The second is that traditional social democracy has played itself out as a political ideology, creating a vacuum that can and should be filled by some new progressive movement with greater contemporary relevance...

...By the early twentieth century the gulf between democratic revisionists and orthodox Marxists made the international socialist movement, like many of its constituent parties, a house divided against itself...

...Properly understood, social democracy is far more than a particular program...

...Yet because the movement had forgotten that these policies, although crucial achievements, were only means to larger ends, social democrats often clung to them tenaciously and lost ground to neoliberal forces offering bolder, more innovative responses to the crisis...

...Today the gales are blowing again, and shelters are needed...

...One of its sources was the recognition that many Marxist predictions had not come to pass...

...Thus social democracy—for that is what democratic revisionism would become— had its origin not in the dilution of orthodox Marxism but rather in the abandonment of its core principles...

...He went on to attack the second pillar, class struggle, which was as flawed as the belief in economic determinism: it was both historically inaccurate and politically debilitating...

...This loss was deepened by the fact that as social democrats were becoming government officials and managers of capitalism, they naturally looked for technocrats rather than intellectuals and activists as party leaders—people comfortable with, and good at, the ordinary politics of ordinary times...

...The first, often espoused by critics, sees social democracy as an unstable half-way house between Marxism and liberalism, cobbled together from elements of different and incompatible tradi66 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 tions...

...Engels, for example, indicated where he believed Marx's true legacy lay when he characterized the master at his funeral as the Darwin of socialism—the man who "discovered the laws of development of human history...

...Bernstein saw them as potential recruits...

...The key is designing policies that encourage flexibility and openness while protecting citizens from the dislocations that a rapidly changing economy can bring...

...In this view, "irresistible economic forces led with the certainty of doom to the shipwreck of capitalistic production...

...Relatively homogenous societies and independent states made an emphasis on solidarity unproblematic during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, but now, thanks to immigration and interdendependence, such appeals are difficult to sustain (at least for those unwilling to flirt with chauvinism and xenophobia...

...Capitalism as a system had developed new vigor, while the bourgeois state had undertaken important political, economic, and social reforms...

...This means that social democrats today, as in the past, must recognize both the dynamism and the destructive potential of capitalism...

...Over the long term, he thought, individuals were motivated by their beliefs, by the vision of a better world: they could not be convinced to struggle or sacrifice for socialism if it were presented merely as the historically necessary result of economic laws...

...If what remains of the social democratic movement cannot return to first principles and convince European publics that they can respond creatively to this longing, we should not be surprised to find that other, less savory movements—of the Jorg Haider/Jean Le Pen variety—arise to fill this crucial role...

...In order to do this, however—and finally relegate historical materialism to the dustbin of history— they had to win majority support for their programs...

...The second component of a truly social democratic program must be communal and social solidarity...

...Today in Europe social democrats are electorally successful but, for the most part, lack distinctive solutions to contemporary problems...

...Populist movements on the right were starting to chip away at the support of traditional liberal and conservative parties...

...Then as now, therefore, many on the left faced a troubling dilemma: capitalism was flourishing, yet was still accompanied by the economic injustices and social fragmentation that had motivated the Marxist project in the first place...

...With true self-knowledge he noted that orthodox Marxists were the last and best of the classical economists, since they put their faith in ineluctable economic mechanisms and doubted the efficacy of government intervention in the economy...

...68 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 Although Bernstein's revisionism is the best known, he was hardly alone...

...It is neither watered-down Marxism nor bulked-up liberalism, but rather a fullfledged alternative to both...

...This intellectual embourgeoisement was accompanied by a social and professional one as well, as generational change took its toll on the movement's leadership and collective memory...

...largely as a result, they have lost the ability to generate enthusiasm among European publics...

...It is instructive to compare this view to contemporaneous statements made, for example, by Germany's Rudolf Hilferding, perhaps the most influential Marxist economic theorist of the interwar years, who argued that there was little socialists could do to alter the course of capitalism...

...Socialist parties had become powerful actors in a number of European countries, yet Marxism could not furnish them with a strategy for using their power to achieve their goals...

...She is working on a book entitled The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Ideological Dynamics of the Twentieth Century...

...He believed that faith in the inevitable future bred a dangerous passivity that would cost socialists the enthusiasm of the masses...

...Where the bourgeoisie preach laxity and submission to fate, we appeal to people's desire for creativity, conscious that we both can and will succeed in shaping a social system in which the fruits of labor will go to the benefit of those who are willing to participate in the common task...

...social democrats are the champions of the welfare state, or equality, or solidarity...

...By the end of the 1930s, all the 70 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 components of what would come to be known as the postwar social democratic compromise had already been developed, although it was only in Sweden that they were fully implemented...

...Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers suggest a reorientation from politics at the national to the local level because they believe that today it is only within smaller groups that the sense of common concern and purpose necessary for progressive politics can be maintained...

...For example, Marx had little to say about the actual transition from capitalism to socialism or about how socialist parties might help bring such a transition about...

...In an era of dislocation and disorientation, these social democrats realized that appeals to the "people," the "community," and the common good were much more attractive than the class struggle of orthodox Marxism or the individualism of classical liberals, and so they often embraced a communitarian, corporatist, and even nationalist approach...

...Indeed, the transformation of the West European political landscape after 1945 was nothing less than amazing, as parties advocating either classical liberal, orthodox Marxist, or old-style conservative politics practically disappeared from the scene...

...This is because the issue at the heart of contemporary globalization debates—whether states can dominate market forces or must bow before them—is in fact very old...

...Nevertheless, social democrats must find some way to refashion communitarian appeals in order to address the dislocations of the contemporary era and generate a broad popular base for the welfare state and activist government...

...It was in response to these problems and frustrations that social democracy emerged...

...Yet by the middle of the century, the pracical consequences of unfettered capitalism—dramatic inequalities, social dislocation, and atomization— led to a backlash against liberalism and a search for alternatives...

...Traditional social democratic principles can form the basis of a distinctive and attractive program today, but only if we remember two points...

...They must join a dedication to economic growth and prosperity to an unwillingness to leave the life chances of individuals to the mercy of the market...

...Indeed, it had little to say about the long-term role of political organizations in general, because it considered economic forces and not political activism to be history's prime mover...

...Furthermore, his belief that socialist society would be harmonious and prosperous implied that REDISCOVERING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY there would be little need for the political institutions that contemporary societies depend on to suppress and moderate conflict...

...This rejection was as thorough as Marx's had been of the basic tenets of liberalism a half-century earlier, something revisionists themselves were not eager at the time to announce but which their opponents saw clearly...

...Hence, during the interwar years many returned to the theme of cross-class cooperation...

...The proletariat was not being immiserated, small farms were not disappearing, and general economic collapse seemed increasingly far off...

...Kautsky taught socialists to recognize that their "goal could only be achieved through a revolution," but that this revolution was not DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 67 REDISCOVERING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY in their power to make: "The revolution cannot be arbitrarily made by us any more than it is possible for our opponents to hinder it...

...The Rise of Revisionism If socialism was not going to come about simply because it was inevitable (as Marx, Engels, and many of their most influential followers believed), then it would have to be achieved as the result of human action...

...He also urged socialists to recognize that attracting the masses would require providing them with a new "faith" that the determinism and economism of orthodoxy could no longer provide...

...Scholars such as Gosta Esping-Andersen and James Galbraith have convincingly argued that a certain type of decommodifying welfare state is entirely compatible with twenty-first century capitalism, and the recent record of countries like Sweden and the Netherlands shows that generous welfare programs and a dynamic economy can easily go together...

...These new leaders presided over unprecedented power and political success, but they lacked the old-timers' hunger and creative spark...

...Then as now, the political environment was dominated by a belief in the primacy of economics and unfettered markets and yet marked by a longing for some type of social control and communal solidarity...

...They felt that if the triumph of socialism was not inevitable, it could be made desirable...

...The schism was epitomized by the debate in Germany between Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein...

...Historical materialism and the primacy of economics were central to Engels, and it was through his writings that the scientific, orthodox Marxism of the Second International was codified...

...Triumph, in short, bred smugness and intellectual stagnation, and the result was a movement that lost touch with its original intellectual and political rationale...

...In the mid-1970s, new economic problems developed across the industrialized world and Western Europe in particular, and many of the specific policies associated with social democracy came under attack...