In the Name of Social Democracy

The Great Transformation: 1945 to the Present

Gerassimos Moschonas, Gregory Elliott

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781859843468
• eBook ISBN: 9781784787967
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Économie politique

Following the locust years of the neo-liberal revolution, social democracy was the great victor at the fin-de-si?cle elections. Today, parties descended from the Second International hold office throughout the European Union, while the Right appears widely disorientated by the dramatic "modernisation" of a political tradition dating back to the nineteenth century.

The focal point of Gerassimos Moschonas's study is the emergent "new social democracy" of the twenty-first century. As Moschonas demonstrates, change has been a constant of social-democratic history: the core dominant reformist tendency of working-class politic notwithstanding, capitalism has transformed social democracy more than it has succeeded in transforming capitalism. Now, in the "great transformation" of recent years, a process of "de-social-democratization" has been set in train, affecting every aspect of the social-democratic phenomenon, from ideology and programs to organization and electorates. Analytically incisive and empirically meticulous, In the Name of Social Democracy will establish itself as the standard reference work on the logic and dynamics of a major mutation in European politics.

Part I

Introduction:
Social Democracy, 1945–73

The past is a bottomless abyss that engulfs everything ephemeral.

(Pascal Quignard)

1

Which Social Democracy?

Two Approaches to Social Democracy

Any political current we glance at becomes, by definition, an object of ambiguity and controversy, creating some perplexity. This is also true of social democracy – possibly rather more so than of other political currents.

Indeed, in so far as the notion of social democracy was constituted as a practical, all-encompassing notion, and in so far as it has become an object of theoretical, ideological and political struggle since Marx, Engels and Lenin, it was destined to be polysemic. Today, depending on the country and tradition concerned, it still arouses multiple echoes. For this reason – and without taking stock of the literature devoted to it – we can say that its various uses are not distinguished by any high degree of consistency and precision. This inevitably limits the heuristic potential of the notion. Moreover, the ‘steady crisis’ and transformation of the various social democracies over the last two decades have called into question the content and coherence of the social-democratic model of the 1950s and 1960s. This crisis, and the ensuing transformation, have made a further dent in the coherent perception of this ‘coherence’.

There are two main approaches to the phenomenon of social democracy, representing different problematics. The first emphasizes the ‘gradualist’ character of the social-democratic approach, underscoring its effective accommodation to the capitalist socioeconomic system. The social-democratic party was an ‘outsider’ that managed to instal itself at the centre of the system, without thereby becoming a centrist party. Located in a temperate zone, it is a force situated between the political extremes. In a sense, social democracy becomes synonymous with ‘reformism’ – that ‘old word saturated with meaning’ – and their relationship would appear to be tautological. This is the crucial distinguishing characteristic, the unum necessarium, the essential ingredient, of the notion.¹ Anthony Crosland’s conception – social democracy = political liberalism + mixed economy + welfare state + Keynesian economic policy + commitment to equality – may be regarded as the classical version of this approach. Here the category of social democracy is basically a generic one, referring to all parties of electoral socialism, whether social-democratic or not.

Social democracy is certainly profoundly reformist. However anti-capitalist it may originally have been, it yielded a social and political regime that is generally regarded as a ‘reformed’ capitalism, both in the methods employed and in the results obtained. But other political currents have been (or are) ‘reformist’, whether out of conviction or necessity (and sometimes in a similar direction to that taken by social democracy), without thereby being (or becoming) ‘social-democratic’. In truth, the real question is not whether social democracy is reformist, but whether there is such a thing as a social-democratic reformism – a specifically social-democratic reformist savoir-faire. That said, this first way of defining social democracy, schematically set out here – the broad definition – results, in my view, in an unduly ‘extensive’ concept of it, one that is not discriminating enough to be operational. Furthermore, because it is so widely applicable, the ‘commitment to reformist measures’ seems to me to mask, in the name of a general and ‘generalized’ reformism, some substantial differences between the concrete parties that have historically belonged to the great European social-democratic/socialist family. The universality of the experience of reformism in Europe, particularly after the Second World War, reduces, without wholly cancelling, the descriptive and explanatory reach of this approach, in which the term ‘social democracy’, extended indefinitely and used in numerous ways, subsumes the specificity of the political forces to which it refers. Thus gains in ‘extension’ are accompanied by a ‘loss in specificity’, if not (to borrow a phrase from Giovanni Sartori) a very significant ‘increase in confusion’.

A contrasting approach, advanced in sophisticated academic versions, understands social democracy as a specific partisan and trade-union structuration of the working-class movement. According to Michel Winock:

Historically, the label [of social democracy] applies to mass working-class parties that achieve a threefold, necessary integration in and through these organizations:

1.the integration or interpenetration of socialism and trade-unionism;

2.the integration of the working class into a complex system constituting a counter-society, which is organized in a network of co-operatives, training schools, youth associations, cultural groups, sports clubs … ;

3.the de facto integration of the socialist movement into parliamentary democracy.²

Specialists are agreed on these three historical features of the European social-democratic and labour parties. They add two further characteristics: the great strength of the social-democratic organization in terms of activists and finances; and its ability, as the undisputed representative of the world of labour, to impose ‘a long-term compromise on the ruling classes, embodied in the Welfare State’.

This second approach to defining social democracy – the narrow definition – possesses greater power of discrimination, and I think it is better equipped to account, through the range and variety of its implications, for the reality of European socialism. If ideological coherence and a specific operational logic distinguish the social-democratic parties, as Alain Bergounioux and Bernard Manin have aptly demonstrated,³ these basically depend upon the structural specificity of the social democracies. Thus, for example, achievement of the social-democratic compromise, which is in a sense the ‘natural’ vocation of every party of a social-democratic type, does not stem exclusively from it, is not principally bound up with a reformist ideology and ‘spirit’. It forms part of a whole, an organism whose axis, frame, nervous system, was constituted by the connection between mass party, labour union and popular electorate, which was achieved early on and proved remarkably resilient. Emphasis is thus put on the more or less structured and distinctive character of the social-democratic edifice, and the unity and ‘complicity’ connecting its component parts. More than ideology and programmes, it is this unity that is at the base of the destiny of social democracy, an actor that has been in place for at least a century, proving its powers of endurance. ‘Social democracy’, Karl Ove Moene and Michael Wallerstein have written, ‘is a distinctive set of institutions and policies that fit together and worked relatively efficiently to reduce both the insecurity and the inequality of income without large sacrifices in terms of economic growth or macroeconomic instability.’⁴

While I obviously do not imagine that such a definition – or any definition – could encompass the essence of social democracy and its historical variants, I think that it permits a better grasp of the true dimensions of the phenomenon. Accordingly, I shall construct my own analysis of social-democratic reality in accordance with it. I shall seek to delineate the components of this ‘distinctive set of institutions and policies’, to extract the skeletal structure and establish how these components function when they are integrated into a political whole possessed of coherence – a coherence that is practical, and not necessarily logical. At the risk of being too neatly diagrammatic, exaggerating the lines and over-simplifying the architecture, this book will seek to describe the decisive forms and foundations of the social-democratic edifice, as well as – and especially – the transformation of this architecture that is now in progress.

The thesis that treats social democracy as a ‘constellation’, a specific political structuration, is the departure and arrival point of the present work, which will in turn, perhaps, provide some arguments for – and against – this thesis.

Word and Thing: A Rapid Historical Overview

In France, the term ‘social democracy’ appeared in the immediate aftermath of the 1848 Revolution. Faced with the party of order, a reconciliation was effected between the democratic republicans of the Mountain (Ledru-Rollin) and the socialists, and their union, proclaimed on 27 January 1849, resulted in the birth of the ‘democratic-socialist’ or ‘social-democratic’ party that February: ‘The socialist and the democratic parties,’ Marx wrote, ‘the party of the workers and the party of the petty bourgeoisie, united to form the social-democratic party – the Red party.’⁵ This coalition – which, according to Marx, stripped the social demands of the proletariat of their ‘revolutionary thrust’ by giving them a ‘democratic cast’ – was crushed by force in June 1849.

In Saxony, Liebknecht and Bebel organized an anti-Prussian collectivist party, of Marxist allegiance, in 1869: the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, which rapidly became ‘social democracy’ for short. Initially critical – and always hesitant about the term, preferring the epithet ‘communist’ – Marx and Engels nevertheless ended up supporting its use politically, particularly after the reunification of the German socialists under Marxist auspices (1875).

The historic contribution of the First International (1864–76), the first co-ordinating body of a nascent working-class movement, consists in the fact that ‘the demand by the proletariat for the conquest of political power was precisely stated for the first time’.⁶ After the dispersal of this conglomerate of unions, co-operatives and embryonic parties, the working-class movement went through a process of constitution marked by the formation of great national parties and the rapid diffusion of Marxist ideas. It increasingly adopted the ‘revolutionary-rational’ format described by Seraphim Seferiades.⁷ In the last quarter of the century, the proletariat transformed itself into a mass movement as well as a political actor. Thus, in a spectacular shift, from the 1880s onwards the term ‘social-democratic’ referred to parties influenced by Marxism. In this respect we must stress that during the First International three terms were used to describe the three main tendencies, their objectives and methods. The first – ‘communism’ – was linked with Marx (and, in part, with the Blanquists); the second – ‘collectivism’ – was applied to Bakunin and his tendency; and the third – ‘socialism’ – designated the moderate tendencies of petty-bourgeois connotation. Following the dissolution of the First International, the labels changed, and it is very interesting to note that ‘social-democratic’ was precisely substituted for ‘communist’, designating those working-class tendencies and parties that accepted the principle of class struggle and the supremacy of political struggle as a means of action. Thus, especially from the 1880s, ‘social-democratic’ became associated with ‘Marxist’, in opposition to the moderate socialists and ‘possibilists’.⁸ Having imposed itself as the dominant current in opposition to anarchism and ‘reformism’, above all in central Europe, Marxism became the official doctrine of the Second International after 1896. Emulating the German party (founded at Gotha in 1875) – which set as its objective integrating the democratic task into the social revolution, and which consequently called itself ‘social-democratic’ – numerous political formations throughout Europe adopted the name.

To understand the identity-formation of social democracy, it is perhaps useful to note here that, in order to achieve its political objectives, it quickly decided to make a double breach in a political system involving property qualifications. It aimed on the one hand to extend political rights to the working class (and hence expand the very restricted civil society of the era); and on the other, to equip the working class intellectually and culturally to master its own political destiny. According to Eduard Bernstein:

A working class without political rights, steeped in superstition and with deficient education, will indeed revolt ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables
• Principal Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Introduction: Social Democracy, 1945–73
• Part II: Contemporary Social Democracy
• Part III: The Logic of the Social-Democratic Transformation (A Synthesis)
• Part IV: Social Democracy in Context
• Part V: Social Democracy in Historical Perspective
• Conclusions
• Epilogue
• Select Bibliography
• Postscript: Social Democracy after the Transformation
• Index