Social Democratic parties
From Hobson's Choice
A group of parties, mostly in Europe, that are based on the principles of social democracy. While social democracy is an ideal and the Social Democratic Parties are "actually existing" parties, it is natural that they sometimes have fallen short of the ideal.
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Background
The most famous social democratic party is that of Germany, which was founded by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1869.[1] While the French Socialist Party suffered the mass execution of its leaders after 1871, it was refounded in 1879 by Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde.[2] The French Socialist Party was plagued by splits and realignments, the Dreyfus Affair, and frustrated nationalism. It would govern in flickers of impetuosity (1936, 1981) culminating in retrenchment or capitulation. Most of these parties actually refered to themselves as social democratic parties and were founded in the period 1870-1890. In Ireland and the Commonwealth, they are usually known as Labour Parties. The social democratic parties were initially much larger than the Communist ones, since the former tended to be well-connected, had an appeal to most classes of women and the politically active civil service; the Communists tended to take positions that made compromise with the authorities impossible.
A case in point was Ferdinand Lassalle, a German lawyer and luminary in the early life of that country's Social Democratic Party.[3] Lassalle proposed that while bourgeois society guaranteed all individuals unlimited development of their individual productive forces the moral idea of the proletariat is to render useful service to the community.The course of history, is a struggle against nature, against ignorance and impotence, and consequently, against slavery and bondage of every kind in which we were held under the law of nature at the beginning of history. The progressive overcoming of this impotence is the evolution of liberty, of which history is an account. In this struggle humanity would never have made one step in advance, and men gone into the struggle singly, each for himself. The state is the contemplated unity and co-operation of individuals in a moral whole, whose function it is to carry on this struggle, a combination which multiplies a million-fold the forces of all the individuals comprised in it, and which heightens a million times the powers which each individual would be able to exert singly.Innocuous to modern ears, one may read this in contrast to the opening passage of the Communist Manifesto to get a different understanding of its intent:
[Science and the Working Man International Library (translated Thorstein Veblen, 1900)]
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.Lassalle was condemned by orthodox Marxists because he had secretly advised Bismarck and sought to harmonize the interests of his party with those of the regime, while publically serving as an oppositionist deputy. Moreover, while borrowing heavily (and sloppily) from Marxist phrases and critiques of bourgeois economics, he remained devoted to collaboration with the existing bourgeois state—anathema to Marx & Engels—and devoted to a non-coercive transition to socialism, which Marx & Engels regarded as patently silly.[4] While the split between the Communists and the Social Democratic parties was actually very complex, the essential problem was that the socialists saw democracy as the bedrock of legitimacy, whereas the Communists wanted to completely smash the social order. Lassalle sought to triagulate the (far right) landlords against the (centrist) capitalists, so that the Social Democrats would be guaranteed power in the state. The Communists saw this as opportunistic and self-defeating. [5] The Social Democrats, they argued, would become morally tied to the bourgeois parliament; they would be unable to challenge them later, were a revolution to arise.
In the event, the Social Democratic parties of Europe have tended to be moderately liberal, while hewing closely to the bourgeoisie of their own countries on matters of foreign policy and diplomatic relations. SDP's have tended to flourish in countries where exports represented an extremely large share of GDP, leading to understanding between the national bourgeois (on the one hand) and the workers (on the other) to use the state as a surrogate for large corporate bureaucracies.
(See captured capital model)
The Cold War
(See main article on the Cold War)
The confrontation between Communist states and the Western powers began in 1918 (not 1947!), although there was a hiatus between 1941 and 1948. This confrontation was stimulated in part by the execution of the Romonovs on 17 July, but chiefly by the separate peace the Bolsheviks signed with the Central Powers.[6] Soon after, there was a period of Allied support for the White (anti-Bolshevik) forces, and successful support for the independence of Poland, the Baltic Republics, and Finland.
During the 1920's the Cold War was not pressed by the Social Democratic parties; in Sweden, the Social Democrats came into government in a coalition with the Liberals in Oct 1917, and later (March-Oct 1920) governed alone. During that time, they succumbed to British pressure to isolate the Bolsheviks, withdrawing diplomatic recognitions.[7] In Denmark, the Social Democrats came to power for the first time in 1924, well after the UK-influenced rupture with the Soviet Union. Soon after, Denmark restored diplomatic relations with Moscow, although this was seen as an assertion of independence from the UK, and not a particularly leftist gesture. Norway needed to restore de jure ties in 1925 in order to resolve sovereignty issues over Svalbard Island in the Arctic Ocean.
[8] Germany's Weimar Republic emerged under SPD control, but no matter what, good relations with Moscow were imperative.
Social democracy in Europe has remained a radical ideology despite decades of political power in Scandinavia, and three generations as a major political tendency in all of Europe. During the 1920's, the social democratic parties suffered from a bitter clash with the hard left (the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), for example, had an especially bitter feud with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and its governments under the Weimar constitution); according to historians like E.H. Carr, [9] this feud enabled the rise of the NSDAP in Germany. In France, the Socialist Party (PS) was often in coalition with the Communist Party (PCF) and several others; and in Scandinavia, the Social Democratic parties completely dominated the left (the Swedish and Danish Communist Parties were quite small and cautious). In Central Europe, there was one parliamentary democracy (Czechoslovakia) between the wars, with a fairly large Communist Party; in the Baltic Republics up to 1940, the Communist parties tended to be illegal, and operated in public as Social Democratic parties (which also became illegal, thanks to a rightwing-dominated military).
The role of the Communist parties is significant because it molded the character of the Social Democratic ones. In France, as we have said, the Socialist Party was in coalition with the PCF; the PCF was pro-Soviet, while the PS was often more of a moderate social democratic-liberal party. Yet they have been fairly congenial. In contrast, the Baltic and Czech Communist Parties had a longstanding family spat, arising from the Communist Party's emergence from the Social Democratic Party (or its equivalent). After 1945-48, the situation switched, and the regimes banned the Social Democrats (who now hid within the Communist Party). Italy and Spain had strong anarchist and socialist parties, but these were crushed by fascist/falangist regimes soon after the war. After 1946, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) mostly deflated, despite efforts by the ruling Christian Democrats and the US government to pump air into it.[10]
After the War, social democracy in Europe became one of two dominant political currents; the other was liberalism, which (as mentioned above) remained tied to classical liberalism. It was divided into two poles, with members tending to fall somewhere in the continuum between them: on the left, the abolition of capitalism through electoral measures, and on the right, support for a social welfare state sustained by a market economy. In Scandinavia, the Social Democrats were accustomed to almost permanent government, and hence developed a special business model that allowed them to sustain strong national enterprises.
Notes
- ↑ Bebel online; Wikipedia: August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht
- ↑ Wikipedia: Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde
- ↑ Archive and biography, Marxists Internet Archive.
- ↑ See "Critique of the Gotha Programme."
- ↑ See, for example, "Engels To Joseph Weydemeyer" (24 Nov 1864), or "Engels To Kautsky In Stuttgart," (23 Feb 1891); notice the passages discussing [Ferdinand] Lassalle, one of the founders of the German Social Democratic Party.
- ↑ Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). The Allied interventions in the future USSR began literally days later, with Entente vessels docking in Murmansk that very week. This intervention was quite small and did not have a significant impact on the outcome of the Russian Civil War.
- ↑ See Patrick Salmon, Scandinavia and the Great Powers, 1890-1940, Cambridge University Press (2002), p.224. Between 1920 and 1930 the Social Democratic Party was in government for 3.8 years; between January 1919 and 1930, Sweden and the USSR did not have either de facto or de jure relations. By 1918, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark had been the only countries with diplomatic ties to the Soviet Union.
- ↑ The Norwegian Labor Party (in Norwegian, Det Norske Arbeiderparti, DNA) first came to power in January 1928 and lasted in office less than a month. They first formed an enduring government in March 1935, which effectively lasted until the Nazi invasion (9 April 1940). By then, recognition of the Moscow government was unexceptional.
- ↑ Carr, The Twilight of the Comintern: 1930-1935, Pantheon Books (1982). The hatred of the SPD and the KPD for each other was exceptionally intense; literature by Communist writers on this era is almost unreadable, as the prose almost chokes with fury at the "betrayal" it alleges on the part of a political party it three times sought to oust in coups, and which it called "social fascism" afterwards. The SPD, reflecting the greater power it held later, held up its end of the feud with icy professionalism and a long memory.
- ↑ Postwar Italy had many parties, and while the Christian Democratic Party usually had the largest number of votes, it sought to cultivate the PSI as its ally in the ranks of labor. But the PSI perversely acquired a reputation as a stooge for the pro-business PCD, so voters sided with the PCI instead. The CIA likewise attempted to build up the PSI through a joint venture with the American Federation of Labor (AFL); see Ronald L. Filippelli, American Labor and Postwar Italy, 1943-1953: A Study of Cold War Politics, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989. This effort was very short lived.
