Social democracy
In modern practice, social democracy has taken the form of predominantly capitalist economies, with the state regulating the economy in the form of welfare capitalism, economic interventionism, partial public ownership, a robust welfare state, policies promoting social equality, and a more equitable distribution of income.
It is supportive of measures to foster greater democratic decision-making in the economic sphere, including co-determination, collective bargaining rights for workers, and expanding ownership to employees and other stakeholders.
[8] In the post-war era, social democrats embraced mixed economies with a predominance of private property and promoted the regulation of capitalism over its replacement with a qualitatively different socialist economic system.
[22] In the early 20th century, social democracy came to refer to support for a process of developing society through existing political structures and opposition to revolutionary means, which are often associated with Marxism.
"[34] As a policy regime,[35] social democracy entails support for a mixed economy and ameliorative measures to benefit the working class within the framework of democratic capitalism.
Social democracy aims to use democratic collective action for promoting freedom and equality in the economy and opposes what is seen as inequality and oppression that laissez-faire capitalism causes.
[38] In the 21st century, it has become commonplace to define social democracy in reference to Northern and Western European countries,[39] and their model of a welfare state with a corporatist system of collective bargaining.
[41] Henning Meyer and Jonathan Rutherford associate social democracy with the socioeconomic order in Europe from the post-war period until the early 1990s.
[42] Social democratic roots are also observed in Latin America during the early 20th century; this was the case in Uruguay during the two presidential terms of José Batlle y Ordóñez.
[65] Marxist revisionist Eduard Bernstein's views influenced and laid the groundwork for developing post-war social democracy as a policy regime, Labour revisionism, and the neo-revisionism[66] of the Third Way.
[76] Later in their lives, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued that in some countries, workers might be able to achieve their aims through peaceful means.
However, Bernstein and Lassalle, along with labourists and reformists such as Louis Blanc in France,[85] led to the widespread association of social democracy with socialist reformism.
[90] In The Future of Socialism (1956), Anthony Crosland argued that "traditional capitalism has been reformed and modified almost out of existence, and it is with a quite different form of society that socialists must now concern themselves.
Crosland believed that these features of reformed managerial capitalism were irreversible, but it has been argued within the Labour Party and by others that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan brought about its reversal in the 1970s and 1980s.
[97] In the early 20th century, the German social democratic politician Eduard Bernstein rejected orthodox Marxist ideas about the inevitable progression of history and the need for revolution, advancing instead the position that socialism should be grounded in ethical and moral arguments and achieved through gradual legislative reform.
[80] Bernstein's ideas were initially not well received; his party maintained the position that reforms should be pursued only as a means to an eventual revolution, not as a substitute for it.
[108] By the post-World War II period and its economic consensus and expansion, most social democrats in Europe had abandoned their ideological connection to orthodox Marxism.
[109] According to Michael Harrington, the primary reason for this was the perspective that viewed the Stalinist-era Soviet Union as having succeeded in usurping the legacy of Marxism and distorting it in propaganda to justify totalitarianism.
[34] During the late 20th century, those labels were embraced, contested and rejected due to the emergence of developments within the European left,[144] such as Eurocommunism,[145] the rise of neoliberalism,[146] the fall of the Soviet Union and the Revolutions of 1989,[147] the Third Way,[148] and the rise of anti-austerity[149] and Occupy[150] movements due to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008[nb 9] and the Great Recession,[152] the causes of which have been attributed by some to the neoliberal shift and deregulation economic policies.
[155] According to both right-wing critics and supporters alike, policies such as universal health care and education are "pure Socialism" because they are opposed to "the hedonism of capitalist society".
[160] Other democratic socialists want to go beyond mere meliorist reforms and advocate the systematic transformation of the mode of production from capitalism to socialism.
[163] Others, such as Tony Judt, described modern liberalism in the United States as representing European social democracy.
[170] Former minister Jay Naidoo has said that South Africa is in serious trouble and is showing signs of a failed state, with record unemployment levels and the fact that many young people will not find a job in their lifetime.
[206] With the Great Depression, economic interventionism and nationalizations became more common worldwide and the post-war consensus until the 1970s saw Keynesian social democratic and mixed economy policies put in place, leading to the post-World War II boom in which the United States, the Soviet Union, the Western European, and East Asian countries experienced unusually high and sustained economic growth, together with full employment.
According to Schweickart, the democratic socialist critique of social democracy is that capitalism can never be sufficiently humanized and that any attempt to suppress its economic contradictions will only cause them to emerge elsewhere.
[136] Marxian socialists argue that social democratic welfare policies cannot resolve the fundamental structural issues of capitalism, such as cyclical fluctuations, exploitation, and alienation.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt III (grandson of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt) and David Belkin criticize social democracy for maintaining a property-owning capitalist class with an active interest in reversing social democratic welfare policies and a disproportionate amount of power as a class to influence government policy.
Although this compromise did not allow for the immediate creation of socialism, it created welfare states and "recognized noncapitalist, and even anticapitalist, principles of human need over and above the imperatives of profit".
[233] Similarly, Irving Kristol argued: "Democratic socialism turns out to be an inherently unstable compound, a contradiction in terms.
This view was adopted by the Communist International, which argued that capitalist society had entered the Third Period in which a proletarian revolution was imminent but could be prevented by social democrats and other fascist forces.
