Social-democracy is inherently contradictory. It is the last form of bourgeois-democracy, prior to its replacement by socialism. It represents the political and ideological reflection of the contradictory and transitional form of capital in its imperialist phase, dominated by large-scale, socialised capital. It is based on the lie that the interests of capital and labour are ultimately the same, and only need to be negotiated, in the short-term. It has been the dominant form of bourgeois-democracy since the latter part of the 19th century, when large-scale, socialised capital expropriated private capital (the expropriation of the expropriators), and became tied to the capitalist state, which it required to increasingly plan and regulate the economy, on an ever widening and deepening scale.
Because it is based on that contradiction, and ultimately the lie, whenever the contradiction sharpens, during a crisis, social-democracy always, itself, faces a crisis, because it must always prioritise the interests of capital over those of labour, whilst social-democracy itself can only continue so long as it has the support of the millions of workers that retain their illusions in it. It must either move forward, further strengthening the social position of the workers, as the personification and collective owners of the socialised capital, (which it only ever does up to the point where the long-term interests of capital are challenged), or it must leave the field. In essence, this is the conclusion drawn by Marx, as early as 1850, and contained within the theory of permanent revolution.
In practice, as I have set out elsewhere, the USSR/Stalinism, and Nazi Germany/fascist Italy etc., also reflected this fundamental contradiction social-democracy sans democracy. All of these phenomenal forms attempted to deal with that contradiction by implementing measures designed to accumulate real industrial capital within the context of the dominance of large-scale socialised capital, and so did so via all of those methods borrowed from the oncoming socialist future, i.e. the planning and regulation of production, on an expanded scale. In the age of imperialism, that expanded scale, also, means on an expanded geographic scale. The choice becomes socialism or barbarism, which, in the age of thermonuclear weapons, means socialism or the end of humanity.
As I wrote at the start of the Ukraine War, which itself is a manifestation of the current global crisis, and need to create even larger single markets, leading to intensifying competition between global imperialist blocs, which is leading to WWIII, unless checked by the global working-class, via socialist revolution, it would undoubtedly call into question whether western social-democracy could survive it. The answer appears to be clearly no.
In the post-war period, social-democracy seemed unassailable. Economies expanded rapidly as did living standards, not just in terms of more necessities, but an ever-expanding range of goods and services, including welfare states providing “free” education and health and social care, and social security in relation to ill-health, unemployment and retirement. This was a “progressive” social-democracy, which was not only based on this expansion of large-scale, socialised industrial capital, but, in turn, sought to facilitate its further expansion, by continually expanding the realm of planning and regulation of the economy. The welfare state, whose outlines were established in Prussia in the early 19th century, enhanced by Bismark in Germany in the late 19th century, and formalised by Chamberlain, Beveridge, and others, in Britain, in the early 20th century, is part of that apparatus of planning and regulation, in relation to the planned supply of labour-power.
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