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 from time to time and engage in conspiracies on a small scale, but it will never develop a socialist movement. … So political rights and education have a prominent position in every socialist programme of action.9
Accordingly, these parties, with the help of their relay-organizations (trade unions and associations of every sort), tended not only to mobilize ‘the people behind the electorate’ (in the words of the Dutch Protestant party ARP),10 but also, prior to the institutionalization of universal suffrage, to mobilize the people before the electorate (and, later, the people as electorate).
Once the incubation period was over, socialism became (as Anton Pelinka put it so eloquently) ‘a political practice, a party, a social democracy’. The third of these – which found its most illustrious expression in the German social-democratic party, and its emblem in the creation of the Second International (1889) – emerged as a ‘developed political instrument’ at the turn of the century, constituted around three objectives: opposition in principle to the capitalist order; extension of political democracy; and reinforcement of international solidarity. In addition, it was constituted around a fourth objective, often ‘underestimated’ and little mentioned by social-democratic doctrinal orthodoxy of the period, but of decisive importance for the penetration and anchorage of social democracy in working-class and popular milieux: immediate improvement in the condition of the working class. As August Bebel said: ‘we enjoy the immense influx and confidence of the working masses only because they can see that we are acting for them in practice, and not simply referring them to some future socialist state, the date of whose arrival nobody knows’.11
Towards 1914, the term ‘social-democratic’ covered the three great tendencies – orthodox, revisionist, revolutionary (Leninist or council-communist) – which crystallized and clashed, in extremely diverse forms and variants, within the European socialist movement. Conveying a culture and an ‘accent’ that were in large part German, thus construed the term assumes a generic character. As such, it does not make it possible to grasp the differences and oppositions that ran through the socialist parties of the epoch. Like Engels before them, Kautsky, Lenin, Bernstein, Branting, Rakovsky or Luxemburg were all social democrats.
Nevertheless, some of the characteristic features long retained by the social-democratic parties were unquestionably fashioned in the period before 1914. In the first place, there was the constitution of the party as strategic locus and centre of impetus for the ‘three-stage structuration’ of the organized working-class movement (party + trade union + ring of specialized associations and organizations of all sorts). In its pilot version – German social democracy – this party was generally thought of as a veritable party-society, at once sub- and counter-society. Secondly, there was the constitution of the party in the form of a class party (based on group social solidarity) and a mass party, a large, robust, centralized organization with a professional apparatus and its own financial basis.
Two main facts caused the birth of the social-democratic party in the modern sense of the term: the contamination of the old working-class parties by nationalism, and the October Revolution. Rather than being the ‘twilight of the gods for the bourgeois regime’, as Bebel had hoped in 1911, the First World War smashed the Second International to pieces, even though it was at the height of its power. By voting military credits one after the other, with very few exceptions, socialists were reduced from enormous influence to virtual total ideological ruin. This remarkable defeat, this paralysis in the face of war, would leave a lasting memory. Amid the turmoil of 1914, the career of prewar social democracy came to an end in schism and extreme debility. A cycle was over. On the basis of the radical potential it liberated, the October Revolution led to an avalanche of splits and the formation of communist parties. This great historical schism, crystallized from 1919 around the creation of the Third (Communist) International, was consummated and consolidated in 1923 with the creation of the Socialist International, rallying prewar revisionist and orthodox currents. The advent of this new divide, the outcome of a differentiation between a ‘reformist right’ and a ‘revolutionary left’ already clearly visible before the war, was of decisive importance. Henceforth, socialists and communists – fraternal enemies, modern Cains and Abels – defined themselves largely in terms of this opposition. The social democrats, deprived of their left wing and hampered by the adhesion to the new communist formations of a significant section of the working class and the younger generations, emerged from the ordeal politically and intellectually impoverished. The intense confrontation between the two great tendencies identified with socialism during the 1920s marked social democracy profoundly, and prompted its identification with reformism. Thus, through the mechanics of this confrontation, social democracy progressed still further in its specificity. Henceforth, ‘social-democratic’ was conventionally attributed to the ‘reformist’ political component of the socialist movement, which – whether dubbed socialist, labour, workers or social-democratic party – was positioned to the ‘right’ of communism, and constructed in direct competition with it. The label ‘social democrat’ – abandoned by Lenin on the eve of the October Revolution – was disparaged and identified, in word and in deed, with effective accommodation to the capitalist socioeconomic system.
During the same period, as severe defeats multiplied for extra-parliamentary action – abortive uprisings in Germany (1919 and 1921), Hungary (1919), Bulgaria and Poland (1923); failed general strikes in France and Czechoslovakia (1920), Norway (1921), and Great Britain (1926) – and as the Soviet regime moved away from democracy, total adherence to parliamentarism and ‘electoralism’ became, in contrast, a central constitutive principle of social democracy’s make-up. Attachment to parliamentary procedures thus became an integral part of the political culture of social democrats – all the more so since parliamentary democracy appeared historically as ‘the result of their struggle’.12
The search for social allies inherent in ‘electoralism’ henceforth tended to reorientate the class character of the social-democratic parties, making them increasingly receptive to the promptings of other social milieux.
Certainly, as Stefano Bartolini has correctly emphasized, ‘electoral socialism was, from the beginning, “entrapped” with large electoral allies – more or less wanted or unwanted – which surely were linked to socialism by politico-ideological motivation, but deprived of solid encapsulation into its organisational network’.13 But ‘total’ acceptance of parliamentary-electoral logic intensified and, above all, imparted a strategic character to the opening to the middle classes. Moreover, it appears as the first stage of a de facto integration into the capitalist order. Marxism survived in social-democratic programmes and phraseology, but not in practical activity.14 Interwar social democracy – a reform party with an anti-capitalist programme – plotted its course ‘with its head facing in one direction, its body in another’.
After the Second World War, the social-democratic parties successively embarked on a process of doctrinal and programmatic de-radicalization, constituting themselves as parties of ‘all the people’. If the anti-capitalist ideal still haunted their internal life, this was mere nostalgia. With the Cold War, the anti-capitalist vocation of social democracy was completely blurred, and it became definitively synonymous with ‘reformism’. The logic of ‘small steps’ and smooth change was substituted for the heroic dream of the past, and any talk of breaks. In the initial postwar period, social democracy was distinguished by the following characteristics, which were common to the majority of European socialist parties, and marked its new doctrine and practice: (a) outright abandonment of the idea of using violence as a means of achieving power; (b) definition of socialism as a social ideal inseparable from the idea of parliamentary democracy; (c) abandonment of the idea of state property in the means of production as a fundamental principle of socialism. The mixed economy, an ‘advanced form of capitalism’ combining a public and a private sector, was henceforth considered the most desirable solution; (d) total opposition to communism, which went back a long way, but now took the form of a virtually unconditional support for the Atlantic Alliance to thwart ‘Soviet expansionism’.15
The blossoming of this social democracy, which found its symbolic reference points in the SPD’s Bad Godesberg programme (1959), was inextricably linked to the expansion in the role of the state and Keynesianism. Through the techniques it offered – which social democracy had sorely lacked in the 1920s and 1930s except in Sweden and Norway – Keynesianism made possible an electorally ideal juncture between the sectoral interests of the working class (fairer distribution of wealth, full employment, strengthening of the role of trade-unionism) and the national interest (sustaining growth). Social democracy in its current and ‘usual’ sense – mature social democracy – was born in this era. The social-democratic synthesis (welfare state, advanced social policy, full employment), which was of central importance in the postwar formation of ‘consensual pragmatism’, served as a criterion and prototype for ‘normal politics’, particularly from 1960 to 1973. This was the era of the ‘social-democratic consensus’.
Although they were perceived, conceived or named differently, in their mature 1960s form, parties of the social-democratic type shared a number of general features, which were partly the legacy of pre-1914 social democracy, and partly new:
1.They were equipped with a mass organization structured around an apparatus that possessed great strength in terms of activists and finances.
2.They retained a privileged link, whether institutionalized or not, with the collective historical force of a working-class trade-unionism that was representative, unified and invariably centralized.
3.In terms of their electoral bases, despite their interclassist ideological profile they remained parties of the working class (in the sense that they were supported by a clear majority – even, in some cases, an overwhelming majority – of that class), without always being class parties. In reality, they were coalition parties whose strength combined a very powerful class base with the gradual crystallization of a significant influence among certain segments of the middle classes (employees, new salaried strata).
4.Their strong domination of the left part of the electoral and political spectrum – the absence, in other words, of a significant competitor on the left – made the social-democratic parties, for all their legendary moderation, popular left-wing parties, not politically and socially intermediate formations, equidistant from the extremes and extremities.
5.They were, in addition, legitimate parties with a governmental vocation, close to ‘majority conformism’. Hence they did not provoke hostility and rejection on the part of the ‘average voter’, as was the case with other ‘reformist’ parties (e.g. the ‘Eurocommunist’ parties), which did not enjoy the same degree of governmental legitimacy despite their often extreme programmatic moderation.
6.The product of these identity traits was the ‘social-democratic compromise’ which, finding its fullest expression in Sweden and Austria, involved the institutionalization of a mode of regulation of social conflicts based on the multiplication of bi- or trilateral arrangements between unions, employers and state. The specific aim of this system was the development and implementation of public policies, especially incomes policies, without major industrial conflicts. It rested on the working-class implantation of the party and the party/union axis, which was the veritable keystone of the edifice.
Thus defined, the ‘social-democratic system of action’16 did not really become established outside central and northern Europe (Scandinavia, Austria, West Germany in part, and, to a lesser extent, the Benelux countries). Labourism – in particular British Labourism, which from the outset did not develop on the basis of a socialist project – represents a borderline case, a less structured version which, at the same time, is clearly distinct and moulded. In contrast, in countries with an influential communist party, a fragmented trade-unionism, and/or significant religious divisions (France, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Spain), socialist parties deviate sharply from this model, despite sometimes possessing a common doctrinal and programmatic framework. The characteristics of this socialism (absence or weakness of the union relay, reduced working-class audience, deficiency of active members, heavy preponderance of middle classes) and its governmental practice (inability to implement enduring procedures of tripartite consultation) mean – at least prima facie – that it is not the equivalent of formations of a social-democratic type.17
The differences indicated here – which are of structural importance, since they concern the very matrix of the parties in question – definitely contribute to dividing the great European socialist/social-democratic family into subgroups with distinct contours.
Notes
1.This attitude towards the social-democratic phenomenon, very widespread in France and abroad, has a large audience – indeed, enjoys a virtual monopoly – in the media. In academic studies it is present implicitly, rather than as an explicit logical construct, adopted as such.
2.Michel Winock, ‘Pour une histoire du socialisme en France’, Commentaire, vol. 11, no. 41, Spring 1988, p. 166.
3.Alain Bergounioux and Bernard Manin, La Social-démocratie ou le compromis, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1979. This work represents one of the most lucid elaborations of what might be taken as an introduction to the phenomenon of social democracy.
4.Karl Ove Moene and Michael Wallerstein, ‘How Social Democracy Worked: Labor-Market Institutions’, Politics and Society, vol. 23, no. 2, 1995, p. 186.
5.Karl Marx, ‘The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850’, in Surveys from Exile, ed. David Fernbach, Penguin/New Left Review, Harmondsworth 1973, p. 90.
6.Jacques Droz, Le Socialisme démocratique (1884–1960), Armand Colin, Paris 1968, p. 13.
7.Seraphim Seferiades, Working-Class Movements (1780s-1930s). A European Macro-Historical Analytical Framework and a Greek Case Study, Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1998, p. 89.
8.Georges Haupt, Aspects of International Socialism 1871–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1986, pp. 6–7.
9.Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, trans. Henry Tudor, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993, p. 160.
10.Quoted in Ruud Koole, ‘Cadre, Catch-all or Cartel? A Comment on the Notion of the Cartel Party’, Party Politics, vol. 2, no. 4, 1996, p. 511.
11.Quoted in Joseph Rovan, Histoire de la Social-démocratie allemande, Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1978, p. 87.
12.Alain Bergounioux and Gérard Grunberg, L’utopie à l’épreuve. Le socialisme européen au XXe siècle, Éditions de Fallois, Paris 1996, p. 34.
13.Stefano Bartolini, Electoral, Partisan and Corporate Socialism. Organisational Consolidation and Membership Mobilisation in Early Socialist Movements, Estudio/Working Paper 83, Juan March Institute, Madrid 1996, p. 53.
14.Mario Telo, Le New Deal européen: la pensée et la politique sociales-démocrates face à la crise des années trente, Université de Bruxelles, Brussels 1988.
15.Daniel Bell, ‘Socialism’, International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, pp. 506–32 (523–5).
16.Marc Lazar, ‘La social-démocratie européenne à l’épreuve de la réforme’, Esprit, no. 251, 1999, p. 124.
17.To a certain extent, but a certain extent only, the parties identified here as the most typically social-democratic correspond to what Bartolini calls ‘encapsulated socialism’. This socialism, characteristic of Sweden, Denmark, Austria and, to a lesser degree, Norway, is distinguished by the fact that the mobilizations of the working-class movement – partisan-organizational, electoral and trade-union – are very strong and interdependent. The British case is representative of the model designated ‘union socialism’, which is characterized, at least initially, by ‘retarded electoral mobilisation, extremely weak partisan mobilisation in the context of early and high corporate mobilisation’. What distinguishes France and Italy and, in another context, the Netherlands, ‘is simply class cleavage undermobilisation in all dimensions’. This is the model of ‘undermobilised socialism’ (Bartolini, Electoral, Partisan and Corporate Socialism, pp. 46 and 52).