Social Democratic Criminology

Robert Reiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138238787
• eBook ISBN: 9781315296753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book argues that 'social democratic criminology' is an important critical perspective which is essential for the analysis of crime and criminal justice and crucial for humane and effective policy. The end of World War II resulted in 30 years of strategies to create a more peaceful international order. In domestic policy, all Western countries followed agendas informed by a social democratic sensibility. Social Democratic Criminology argues that the social democratic consensus has been pulled apart since the late 1960s, by the hegemony of neoliberalism: a resuscitation of nineteenth-century free market economics. There is now a gathering storm of apocalyptic dangers from climate change, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and other existential threats. This book shows that the neoliberal revolution of the rich pushed aside social democratic values and policies regarding crime and security and replaced them with tougher 'law and order' approaches. The initial consequence was a tsunami of crime in all senses. Smarter security techniques did succeed in abating this for a while, but the decade of austerity in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis has seen growing violent and serious crime.

Social Democratic Criminology charts the history of social democracy, discusses the variety of conflicting ways in which it has been interpreted, and identifies its core uniting concepts and influence on criminology in the twentieth century. It analyses the decline of social democratic criminology and the sustained intellectual and political attacks it has endured. The concluding chapter looks at the prospects for reviving social democratic criminology, itself dependent on the prospects for a rebirth of the broader social democratic movement.

Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, cultural studies, politics, history, social policy, and all those interested in social democracy and its importance for society.

1

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

Political history of a moral crusade

Social democracy has a strong claim to being the most successful form of socialism since the birth of both labels in the early nineteenth century. Despite being declared dead many times since the 1970s hegemony of neoliberalism, social democracy and its close cousin democratic socialism are vibrant contenders in the political and economic turbulence of the twenty-first century (Bhaskar 2019; Gilbert 2020). The meaning and influence of social democracy has gone through a variety of transformations in its 200 years of life, as this chapter analyses.

Many commentators and politicians saw ‘a social democratic moment’ in the wake of the 2007/8 financial crisis (notably Ed Miliband, leader of the British Labour Party from 2010–15 cf. Goes 2016; Cowley 2018). The attempt to save a silver lining from the clouds of economic recession was alas short lived, despite a widespread sense that it revealed fatal flaws in the neoliberal economic model that had been hegemonic since the 1970s (Gamble 2009, 2014; Crouch 2011; Schafer and Streeck 2013; Mirowski 2014; Streeck 2014, 2017; Davies 2016; Blakeley 2019). Within a few years a heroic rescue operation to avert total meltdown of the financial system was succeeded by a doubling down of neoliberalism, in the shape of austerity policies pursued by most Western governments (Blyth 2015; Mendoza 2015; Tooze 2018). These were purportedly justified by a dominant discourse, enthusiastically promoted in the largely right-wing mass news media. This blamed the rescuers – the governments that poured resources into the financial system – for profligate public spending, and shielded the perpetrators – the casino banking sector. Social democracy was villainised by the Right, and written off as dead even by many who are sympathetic to its aspirations (Lavelle 2008; Keane 2016; Marliere 2017; Barbieri 2017 (Foreign Affairs); Broning 2017 (FA); Lawson 2018).

Most current discussions of social democracy are beset by ambiguities and antinomies that have bedeviled the project since its origins in the early nineteenth century. These concern both the conception of social democratic aims and values, and the strategies for achieving them. In essence, there is tension between espousing social democracy as a species of socialism distinguished by specific strategies to achieve it, or as mere sticking-plaster to ameliorate the evils of capitalism. Is social democracy a road to socialism or a perpetual Sisyphean struggle to reform capitalism? And in either case, what, if any, role is there for revolutionary tactics as distinct from legal and parliamentary campaigning? Are there circumstances when law-breaking or violence may be justified, as a necessary step towards realising democracy? Is social democracy primarily a foundational set of values or a historically variable cluster of political tactics and institutions?

Social democracy: a historical overview

This chapter aims to chart the history of social democracy and identify its core meanings. Social democracy has been an explicit label for a variety of different perspectives and movements since the middle of the nineteenth century. Four broad periods in its history can be distinguished.

Before World War I: social democracy is socialism

Social democracy’s origins lie in the same maelstrom as all other versions of socialism: the tumultuous currents of conflict in political economy, ideology, and society generated by the advent of industrial capitalism and urbanisation. The intellectual and moral roots of socialism and social democracy go back much further still, to the Old and New Testaments (Dennis and Halsey 1988; Rogan 2018; Dorrien 2019), Greek and Roman philosophy (Gray 1946), and a host of social rebellions through the ages, from slave and peasant revolts in ancient and medieval times (Urbainczyk 2008; O’Brien 2016), to the ferment of crypto social democratic ideas during the English Civil War of the sixteenth century and the ensuing Commonwealth (Hill 1991; Gurney 2012; Rees 2017; Robertson 2018).

For much of the nineteenth century there was little to distinguish socialism, Marxism, and social democracy as labels. True, the Left was riddled by the narcissism of small differences, devastatingly lampooned in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. But the terms ‘socialist’, ‘social democrat’, and ‘Marxist’ were used widely and almost interchangeably by most self-described champions of the working-class masses (Sassoon 1996 Chap. 1). Even Trotsky once declared that his nationality was ‘Social Democratic’ (Slezkine 2006 p. 169).

The roots of subsequent conflicts may be discerned in Marx and Engels’ critique of the ‘utopian’ socialism of early pioneers such as St Simon (Taylor 2016) and Robert Owen (Owen 1991; Thompson and Williams 2011), although they were seen as important stepping stones to ‘scientific’ socialism (Marx and Engels 1848/1998; Engels 1880). Arguably the ‘utopian’ socialists were closer to the later meanings of social democracy, as it came to be distinguished from communism during the twentieth century, although social democracy’s prime selling point paradoxically came to be non-utopian pragmatism and realism. But in the nineteenth century the term ‘social democracy’ was largely used as synonymous with socialism rather than a special brand of it.

Certainly the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party, founded in 1869 and the first to carry the label, was primarily Marxist. Despite the twentieth-century connotations of the term, the Social Democratic Party was the most militantly socialist of the various organisations championing working-class unionisation and the political emancipatory struggles which emerged at that time. So too was the British Social Democratic Federation (SDF) founded in 1881 by Henry Hyndman. The SDF was one of the factions that came together to form the Labour Party at the turn of the twentieth century, although it was always at odds with the non-Marxist majority and disaffiliated in 1901.

In the late nineteenth century there began to emerge the seeds of conflict between revolutionary and reformist interpretations of socialism, laying the ground for the twentieth-century interpretation of social democracy as distinct from Marxism. For the past 100 years ‘democracy’ has mainly been seen as a limit on the legitimate tactics of socialism, and arguably on its aims as well. But hitherto the terms ‘social’ and ‘democracy’ were seen not only as fully compatible but indeed mutually necessary. Democracy, in the broadest sense of giving all people equal power to determine their lives and realise their aspirations (subject to the same for everyone else), requires rough equality in material resources and in social esteem. And the equalisation of formal political power signified by the universal franchise was regarded by most opinion, Left or Right, as bolstering the prospects of prosperity and security for the masses. Very few anticipated that, after gaining the franchise, significant proportions of the less well-off would support conservative parties. Disraeli, the driving force behind the 1867 Reform Act that began the enfranchisement of the working class, may have discerned angels in the marble (paraphrasing his obituary in The Times), but this optimism or pessimism – depending on political standpoint – was not shared by many contemporary commentators or politicians.

The foundation of Social Democratic parties, initially including many Marxists, was itself an indication that there was widespread belief that political participation in bourgeois democratic institutions could facilitate progress towards socialism. Soon after their foundation, however, Social Democratic parties began to experience conflict between ‘revisionist’ or evolutionary socialists on the one hand, and more orthodox Marxist and other revolutionary currents on the other.

The foremost figure in the emergence of an explicitly revisionist version of socialism within the German Social Democratic Party was Eduard Bernstein. A friend and protégé of Marx and Engels (who named him as one of his literary executors), Bernstein drafted the party’s 1891 ‘Erfurt Programme’ (together with Karl Kautsky and August Bebel). This postulated that the transcendence of capitalism by socialism, as well as reforms of immediate benefit to the working class, could be accomplished by legal participation in democratic processes (which attracted a forthright critique from Engels).

During the 1890s Bernstein became increasingly critical of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, and in particular questioned the possibility or desirability of its revolutionary overthrow. The actions of trade unions and social democratic parties, together with broader shifts in political economy and society, were considerably ameliorating the condition of the working class, argued Bernstein. This rendered revolution both less necessary and less feasible. The goals of socialism were being achieved by gradual evolution towards greater social justice and inclusion. These views were developed by Bernstein in a series of papers culminating in his seminal 1899 book, translated into English as Evolutionary Socialism (Bernstein 1899/1963). This attracted considerable criticism from erstwhile comrades such as Kautsky and Bebel, expressed most vigorously by Rosa Luxemburg in her Social Reform or Revolution? (Luxemburg 1899/2006. For fuller accounts of Bernstein and the revisionist debate cf. Gay 1962; Tudor and Tudor 1988; Steger 2008; Beilharz 2009 Chap. 3).

Similar conflicts occurred at the turn of the twentieth century in all social democratic parties. In France the French Socialist Party was founded in 1902 by Jean Jaures, merging a number of social democratic groups. However, it was opposed by Jules Guesde’s revolutionary Socialist Party of France, although the parties united in 1905 and became the French section of the Second International. Under the leadership of Leon Blum, Jaures’ protégé who succeeded him in 1914 when the anti-war Jaures was assassinated by a nationalist, the French Socialist Party continued on revisionist social democratic lines. In 1920, however, its more militant sections broke away and founded the French Communist Party (Colton 1987; Kurtz 2014; Birnbaum 2015).

In England the Labour Party has always been predominantly evolutionary. Indeed, one of its most influential constituents was the Fabian Society (Mackenzie and Mackenzie 1977; Beilharz 1992) which was predicated on gradual reformism (it had a considerable impact on Bernstein’s development of revisionism during his exile in London). As seen from the foregoing, Hyndman’s revolutionary Social Democratic Federation was also involved in the foundation of the Labour Party but rapidly split from it (Pelling 1966; Bevir 2011; Thorpe 2015).

The most fateful split occurred within the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. In 1903, Lenin gained a temporary majority for his view that membership should be restricted to revolutionaries, as advocated by his pamphlet What is to Be Done? (Lenin 1901/1966). Henceforth he called his faction the ‘Bolsheviks’ (meaning ‘majority’), dubbing his opponents ‘Mensheviks’ (‘minority’). The Bolsheviks formally split off in 1912, and in October 2017 ousted the Menshevik government that had taken power in the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: social democracy – the Utopia that worked
• 1 Social democracy: political history of a moral crusade
• 2 Social democratic criminology: the political and moral economy of crime and criminal justice
• 3 The strange death of social democratic criminology
• 4 Conclusion: born-again social democratic criminology
• Index