Adam Przeworski

Social Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon

Not to repeat past mistakes: the sudden resurgence of a sympathetic interest

in Social Democracy is a response to the urgent need to draw lessons from the
history of the socialist movement. After several decades of analyses worthy of
an ostrich, some rudimentary facts are finally being admitted. Social Democracy
has been the prevalent manner of organization of workers under capitalism.
Reformist parties have enjoyed the support of workers. Perhaps even more:
for better or worse, Social Democracy is the only political force of the Left
that can demonstrate an extensive record of reforms in favour of the workers.
Any movement that seeks to transform historical conditions operates under
these very conditions. The movement for socialism develops within capitalism
and faces definite choices that arise from this very organization of society.
These choices have been threefold: (1) whether to seek the advancement of
socialism through the political institutions of the capitalist society or to confront
the bourgeoisie directly, without any mediation; (2) whether to seek the agent
of socialist transformation exclusively in the working class or to rely on multi-
27
and even supra-class support; and (3) whether to seek improvements,
reforms, within the confines of capitalism or to dedicate all efforts and
energies to its complete transformation.
Social democrats choose to participate, to seek supra-class alliances, and
to struggle for reforms. Yet these decisions are not independent of
each other. What is crucial to understand is the development of social
democracy as a process: the manner in which the response to any one
of these alternatives opens and closes the subsequent choices. For it
may be that any movement that chooses to participate in bourgeois
institutions, and specifically in elections, must seek support for socialist
transformation beyond the working class and must struggle for all
improvements that are possible in the short run without regard for
ultimate consequences. Are the decisions to participate and the strategy
of supra-class appeal inextricably connected? Is the orientation toward
immediate reforms a necessary consequence of broadening the class
base? Is an electoral party that would be based exclusively on working
class support and dedicated exclusively to ultimate goals even possible?
These are the kinds of questions that need to be answered if we are to
draw lessons from the social democratic experience. What we need to
know is the logic of choices faced by any movement for socialism
within capitalist society: the historical possibilities that are opened
and closed as each choice is made.
The Decision to Participate

The reason why involvement in bourgeois politics has never ceased

to evoke controversy is that the very act of taking part in this system
shapes the movement for socialism and its relation to workers as a
class. The recurrent question is whether involvement in bourgeois
institutions can result in socialism, or must strengthen the capitalist
order. Is it possible for the socialist movement to find a passage
between the two reefs charted by Rosa Luxemburg: abandonment
of the mass character or abandonment of the final goals?1 Participation
in electoral politics is necessary if the movement for socialism is to
find mass support among workers, yet this participation seems to
obstruct the attainment of final goals. Working for today and working
toward tomorrow appear as contrasting horns of a dilemma.
Participation imprints a particular structure upon the organization of
workers as a class. These effects of participation upon internal class
relations have been best analysed by Luxemburg: the division between
political struggle and economic struggle and their separation is but an
artificial product, even if historically understandable, of the parlia-
mentary period. On the one hand, in the peaceful development,
normal for the bourgeois society, the economic struggle is fraction-
alized, disaggregated into a multitude of partial struggles limited to
each firm, to each branch of production. On the other hand, the
political struggle is conducted not by the masses through direct action,
but, in conformity with the structure of the bourgeois state, in the
1Dick Howard, Re-reading Rosa Luxemburg, Telos, 18, Winter 19734, pp.
89107.

28
representative fashion, by the pressure exercised upon the legislative
body.2
The first effect of the structure of bourgeois state is thus that wage-
earners are formed as a class in a number of independent and often
competitive organizations, most frequently as trade-unions and
political parties, but also as cooperatives, neighbourhood associations,
clubs, etc. One characteristic feature of capitalist democracy is the
individualization of class relations at the level of politics and ideology.3
People who are capitalists or wage-earners within the system of
production all appear in politics as undifferentiated individuals or
citizens. Hence, even if a political party succeeds in forming a class
on the terrain of political institutions, economic and political organiz-
ations never coincide. A multiplicity of unions and parties represent
different interests and compete with each other. Moreover, while the
class base of unions is confined to those who are more or less perma-
nently employed, political parties which organize wage-earners must
also mobilize people who are not members of unions. Hence there is a
permanent tension between the narrower interests of unions and the
broader interests represented by parties.4
The second effect is that relations within the class become structured as
relations of representation. Parliament is a representative institution:
it seats individuals, not masses. A relation of representation is thus
imposed upon the class by the very nature of capitalist democratic
institutions. Masses do not act directly in defence of their interests;
they delegate this defence. This is true of unions as much as of parties:
the process of collective bargaining is as distant from the daily
experience of the masses as elections. Leaders become representatives.
Masses represented by leaders: this is the mode of organization of the
working class within capitalist institutions. In this manner participation
demobilizes the masses.
The organizational dilemma extends even further. The struggle for
socialism inevitably results in the embourgeoisement of the socialist
movement: this is the gist of Robert Michels classical analysis. The
struggle requires organization; it demands a permanent apparatus, a
salaried bureaucracy; it calls for the movement to engage in economic
activities of its own. Hence socialist militants inevitably become
bureaucrats, newspaper editors, managers of insurance companies,
directors of funeral parlours, and even Parteibudigerparty bar keepers.
All of these are petty bourgeois occupations. They impress, Michels
concluded, . . . a markedly petty bourgeois stamp.5 As a French
dissident wrote recently, The working class is lost in administering
its imaginary bastions. Comrades disguised as notables occupy them-
selves with municipal garbage dumps and school cafeterias. Or are
these notables disguised as comrades? I no longer know.6
2
Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions,
in M. A. Waters (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, New York 1970, p. 202.
3
Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, London 1971, pp. 656; Nicos
Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, NLB London 1973.
4
Cf. Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics, London 1977, p. 129.
5
Robert Michels, Political Parties, New York 1962, p. 270.
6
Guy Konopniki, Vive le centenaire du PCF, Paris 1979, p. 53.

29
A party that participates in elections must forsake some alternative
tactics: this is the frequently diagnosed tactical dilemma. As long as
workers did not have full political rights, no choice between
insurrectionary and parliamentary tactics was necessary. Indeed,
political rights could be conquered by those who did not have them
only through extraparliamentary activities. Csar de Paepe, the founder
of the Parti Socialiste Brabanon, wrote in 1877 that in using our
constitutional right and legal means at our disposal we do not renounce
the right to revolution.7 This statement was echoed frequently,
notably by Engels in 1895. Alex Danielsson, a Swedish left-wing
socialist, maintained in a more pragmatic vein that Social Democrats
should not commit themselves to a dogma regarding tactics that
would bind the party to act according to the same routine under all
circumstances.8 That the mass strike should be used to achieve
universal (and that meant male) suffrage was not questioned, and
both the Belgian and Swedish parties led successful mass strikes that
resulted in extensions of suffrage.
Yet as soon as universal suffrage was obtained, the choice between the
legal and the extra-parliamentary tactics had to be made. J. McGurk,
the Chairman of the Labour Party, put it sharply in 1919: We are
either constutionalists or we are not constitutionalists. If we are consti-
tutionalists, if we believe in the efficacy of the political weapon (and
we do, or why do we have a Labour Party?) then it is both unwise and
undemocratic because we fail to get a majority at the polls to turn
around and demand that we should substitute industrial action.9
The turning point in the tactics of several parties occurred after the
failures of general strikes organized around economic issues. While
strikes oriented toward suffrage had been generally successful, the
use of mass strikes for economic goals resulted in political disasters
in Belgium in 1902,10 Sweden in 1909,11 France in 1920,12 Norway in
1921,13 and Great Britain in 1926.14 All these strikes were defeated;
in the aftermath trade-union membership was decimated and repressive
legislation was passed. These common experiences of defeat and
repression directed socialist parties toward an almost exclusive reliance
on electoral tactics. Electoral participation was necessary to protect
the movement from repression: this was the lesson drawn by socialist
leaders. As Kautsky wrote already in 1891, The economic struggle
demands political rights and these will not fall from heaven.15
To win votes of people other than workers, particularly the petty
bourgeosie, to form alliances and coalitions, to administer the govern-
ment in the interest of workers, a party cannot appear to be irrespon-
7 Carl Landauer, European Socialism, I, Berkeley 1959, p. 457.
8 Herbet Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, Totowa 1973, p. 362.
9 Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, London 1975, p. 69.
10 Landauer, European Socialism, I, pp. 4723.
11 Berndt Schiller, Years of Crisis, 190614, in Steven Koblick (ed.), Swedens

Development from Poverty to Affluence, 17501970, Minneapolis 1975, pp. 208217.

12 Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, Princeton 1975, p. 158.
13 William A. Lafferty, Economic Development and the Response of Labour in Scandinavia,

Oslo 1971, p. 191.

14 Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, p. 148.
15 Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle, New York 1971, p. 186.

30
sible, to give any indication of being less than whole-hearted about
its commitment to the rules and the limits of the parliamentary game.
At times the party must even restrain its own followers from actions
that would jeopardize electoral progress. Moreover, a party oriented
toward partial improvements, a party in which leader-representatives
lead a petty bourgeois life style, a party that for years has shied away
from the streets cannot pour through the hole in the trenches, as
Gramsci put it, even when this opening is forged by a crisis. The
trouble about the revolutionary left in stable industrial societies,
observed Eric Hobsbawn, is not that its opportunities never came,
but that the normal conditions in which it must operate prevent
it from developing the movements likely to seize the rare moments
when they are called upon to behave as revolutionaries. . . . Being
a revolutionary in countries such as ours just happens to be
difficult.16
This dilemma became even more acute when democracyrepresen-
tative democracy characteristic of bourgeois societyceased to be
merely a tactic and was embraced as the basic tenet of the future
socialist society. Social democratic parties recognized in political
democracy a value that transcends different forms of organization of
production. Jean Jaurs claimed that: The triumph of socialism will
not be a break with the French Revolution but the fulfillment of the
French Revolution in new economic conditions.17 Eduard Bernstein
saw in socialism simply democracy brought to its logical conclusion,18
and ever since then the recurrent theme of social democracy has been
precisely the notion of extending the democratic principle from the
political to the social, in effect principally economic, realm. Represen-
tative democracy became for social democrats simultaneously the
means and the goal, the vehicle for socialism and the political form
of the future socialist society, simultaneously the strategy and the
programme, instrumental and prefigurative.19
This commitment made, however, even more crucial the question
whether, as Harold Laski put it, capitalist democracy will allow its
electorate to stumble into socialism by the accident of the verdict at
the polls.20 The most important reservation toward an exclusive com-
mitment to electoralism stemmed from the tenuous nature of bourgeois
legality. Little is to be gained by interpreting and reinterpreting every
word Marx wrote about bourgeois democracy for the simple reason
that Marx himself, and the people who led the newly founded parties
into electoral battles, were not quite certain what to expect of electoral
competition. The main questionone which history never resolved
because it cannot be resolved once and for allwas whether the
bourgeoisie would respect its own legal order in case of an electoral
triumph of socialism. If socialists were to use the institution of
16 Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries, New York and London 1973, pp. 1415.
17 Jean Jaurs, Lesprit du socialisme, Paris 1971, p. 71.
18 Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, New York 1961.
19 For the views of Kautsky and Luxemburg, who were somewhat more cautious,

see Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 18801938, NLB
London 1979 and Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, NLB London 1976.
20 Harold Laski, Democracy in Crisis, Chapell Hill 1935, p. 77.

31
suffrageestablished by the bourgeoisie in its struggle against
absolutismto win elections and to legislate a society toward socialism,
would the bourgeoisie revert to illegal means to defend its interests? This
is what happened in France in 1851, and it seemed likely that it would
happen again. But on several occasions Marx entertained the possibility
that in England or in Holland counter-revolution would not occur if
workers won the majority in the parliament. Thus, the essential
question facing socialist parties was whether, as Hjalmar Branting
posed it in 1886, the upper class [would] respect popular will even
when it demanded the abolition of its own privileges.21 Sterky, the leader of
the left wing of the Swedish party, was among those who took a clearly
negative view: Suppose that . . . the working class could send a
majority to the legislature; not even by doing this would it obtain
power. One can be sure that the capitalist class would then take care
not to continue along a parliamentary course but would instead resort
to bayonets.22 This was eventually the position defended by Luxem-
burg in 1900.23 No one could be completely certain: according to
Salvadori, Kautsky wobbled each time he approached this question.24
Austrian Socialists promised in their Linz programme of 1926 to
govern in strict accordance with the rules of the democratic state,
but they still felt compelled to warn that should the bourgeoisie by
boycotting revolutionary forces attempt to obstruct the social change
which the labour movement in assuming power is pledged to
carry out, then social democracy will be forced to employ dictatorial
means to break such resistance.25 The main doubt about electoral
participation was whether revolution would not be necessary in any
case, as August Bebel put it in 1905, as as a purely defensive
measure, designed to safeguard the exercise of power legitimately
acquired through the ballot.26 Dictatorship of the proletariat, and
revolutionary violence, might be necessary even if the party adhered
strictly to its electoral commitment. Tactical dualism could not be
easily foresaken.27

Hence social democrats faced a dilemma, dramatized by Gay in his

biography of Bernstein. Is democratic socialism, then, impossible?
Or can it be achieved only if the party is willing to abandon the
democratic method temporarily to attain power by violence in
the hope that it may return to parliamentarism as soon as control
is secure. Surely this second alternative contains tragic possibilities:
a democratic movement that resorts to authoritarian methods to
gain its objective may not remain a democratic movement for long.
Still, the first alternativeto cling to democratic procedures
under all circumstancesmay doom the party to continual political
impotence.28
21 Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, p. 361.
22 Ibid.
23
Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, New York 1970, p. 28.
24
Salvadori, Karl Kaustky and the Socialist Revolution, pp. 66 and 80.
25
Norbert Lesor, Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal, Journal of Contemporary History,
11, 1976, pp. 13348, p. 145.
26
Carl E. Shorske, German Social Democracy 19051917, New York 1955, p. 43.
27
Cf. Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg.
28
Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, New York 1970, p. 7.

32
Social Democracys Forward March

In spite of all the ambivalence, in spite of the pressure of short-term

preoccupations, socialists entered into bourgeois politics to win
elections, to obtain an overwhelming mandate for revolutionary
transformations, and to legislate the society into socialism. This was
their aim and this was their expectation.
Electoral participation was based on the belief that democracy is not
only necessary but that it is sufficient for reaching socialism. If one
thing is certain, Engels wrote in 1891 (a letter that was to meet with
Lenins acute displeasure), it is that our Party and the working class
can only come to power under the form of democratic republic. This
is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.29 Jaurs
saw in democracy the largest and most solid terrain on which the
working class can stand . . . the bedrock that the reactionary bour-
geoisie cannot dissolve without opening fissures in the earth and
throwing itself into them.30 Millerand was, as always, most incisive:
To realize the immediate reforms capable of relieving the lot of the
working class, and thus fitting it to win its own freedom, and to begin,
as conditioned by the nature of things, the socialization of the means of
production, it is necessary and sufficient for the socialist party to
endeavour to capture the government through universal suffrage.31
Socialists entered elections because they were concerned about im-
mediate improvements of workers conditions. Yet they also entered in
order to bring about socialism. Was this divergence between cause
and purpose a symptom of rationalization? Was the pathos of final
goals just a form of self-deception?
Such questions are best left for psychologists to resolve. But one thing
is certain. Those who led socialist parties into electoral battles believed
that dominant classes can be beaten at their own game. Socialists
were deeply persuaded that they would win election, that they would
obtain for socialism the support of an overwhelming numerical
majority. They put all of their hopes and their efforts into electoral
competition because they were certain that electoral victory was within
reach. Their strength was in numbers, and elections are an expression
of numerical strength. Hence, universal suffrage seemed to guarantee
socialist victory, if not immediately then certainly within the near
future. Revolution would be made at the ballot box. Among the many
expressions of this conviction is the striking apologia delivered by
Engels in 1895: The German workers . . . showed the comrades in all
countries how to make use of universal suffrage. . . . With the successful
utilization of universal suffrage . . . an entirely new method of prolet-
arian struggle came into operation, and this method quickly developed
even further. It was found that state institutions, in which the rule
of the bourgeoisie is organized, offer the working class still further
29
Frederick Engels and Karl Marx, Correspondence 184695, Moscow 1935, p. 486.
30
Leslie Derfler, Socialism since Marx: A Century of the European Left, New York
1973, p. 59.
31
R. C. K. Ensor, Modern Socialism as Set Forth by the Socialists in their Speeches,
Writings and Programs, New York 1908, p. 54.

33
opportunities to fight these very state institutions. And Engels offered
a forecast: If it [electoral progress] continues in this fashion, by the
end of the century we shall . . . grow into the decisive power in the
land, before which all other powers will have to bow, whether they
like it or not.32
The grounds for this conviction were both theoretical and practical.
Already in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels described
socialism as the movement of the immense majority.33 In an 1850
article on The Chartists in the New York Daily Tribune and then
again in 1867 in the Polish emigre newspaper Glos Wolny, Marx repeated
that universal suffrage is the equivalent of political power for the
working class of England, where the proletariat forms the large
majority of the population. . . .34 Kautskys The Class Struggle, probably
the most influential theoretical statement of the early socialist move-
ment, maintained that the proletariat already constituted the largest
class in all civilized countries.35 And even if the first electoral battles
would not end in triumph, even if the proletariat was not yet the
majority, electoral victory seemed only a matter of time because
capitalism was swelling the ranks of the proletarians. The development
of factory production and its corollary concentration of capital and
land were leading rapidly to proletarianization of craftsmen, artisans,
merchants, and small agricultural proprietors. Even the physician,
the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science were being con-
verted into proletarians, according to The Communist Manifesto. This
growth of the number of people who sold their labour power for a
wage was not accidental, temporary, or reversible: it was viewed as a
necessary feature of capitalist development. Hence, it was just a
question of time before almost everyone, all but a handful of
exploiters, would become proletarians. Socialism would be in the
interest of almost everyone, and the overwhelming majority of the
people would electorally express their will for socialism. A young
Swedish theoretician formulated this syllogism as follows in 1919:
The struggle for the state is political. Its outcome is therefore to a
very great extent contingent upon the possibility open to societys
memberswhose proletarianism has been brought about by the
capitalist processto exercise their proper influence on political
decision-making. If democracy is achieved, the growth of capitalism
means a corresponding mobilization of voices against the capitalist
system itself. Democracy therefore contains an automatically operative
device that heightens the opposition to capitalism in proportion to the
development of capitalism.36
Indeed, while those who eventually became communists saw in the
Russian Revolution the proof that successful insurrection is always
possible, for social democrats the necessity to rely on an insurrection
32 Frederick Engels, Introduction (1895) to Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in
France, 184850, Moscow 1960, p. 22.
33 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, The Revolutions

of 1848, Penguin/NLR Marx Library, London 1976.

34
Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile, Penguin/NLR Marx Library, London 1976.
35 Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle, p. 43.
36 Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, p. 402.

34
of a minority meant only that conditions for socialism were not yet
mature.37 While Branting, for example, shared Gramscis first reaction
to the October Revolution38 when he maintained that the whole
developmental idea of socialism is discarded in Bolshevism, he drew
precisely the conclusion that socialists should wait until conditions
ripen to the point that an overwhelming majority of the people would
electorally express their will for socialist transformations.39 Since they
were thoroughly persuaded that such conditions would be brought
about by the development of capitalism, social democrats were not
chagrined by electoral reversals, which were interpreted only to mean
that the point had not yet arrived. Even when they had to relinquish
control over the government, social democrats were not tempted to
hasten the course of history. History spoke through the people, who
spoke in elections, and no one doubted that history would make people
express their will for socialism.

These expectations, based on the conviction about the future course

of history, were almost immediately vindicated by the electoral progress
of socialist parties. The German partyposed by Engels as the model
to be followeddespite years of depression grew from 125,000 votes
in 1871 to 312,000 in 1881, 1,427,000 in 1890, to 4,250,400 on the eve
of World War I. Indeed, as soon as the Anti-Socialist laws were allowed
to lapse, the SPD became in 1890 the largest party in Germany with
19.7 per cent of the vote. By 1912 their share of 34.8 per cent was
more than twice that of the next largest party. No wonder that Bebel
in 1905 could make explicit the widely held assumption of his fellow
socialists that the working class would continue to grow and that the
party would one day embrace a majority of the population. . . .40
Several parties entered even more spectacularly into the competition
for votes. In 1907, Finnish Social Democrats won the plurality, 37
per cent, in the first election under universal suffrage. The Austrian
Social Democrats won 21.0 per cent after male franchise was made
universal in 1907, 25.4 per cent in 1911, and the plurality of 40.8 per
cent in 1919. The Belgian Parti Ouvrier won 13.2 per cent when the
regime censitaire was abolished in 1894 and kept growing in jumps to
win in 1925 the plurality of 39.4 per cent, a success which stimulated
them to hope that continuing industrialization would produce an
increasing socialist working-class electorate.41 Even in those countries
where the first steps were not equally dramatic, electoral progress
seemed inexorable. In the religiously politicized Netherlands, socialism
marched in big steps, from 3 per cent of the total vote in 1896 to 9.5
per cent, 11.2 per cent, 13.9 per cent and 18.5 per cent in 1913. The
Danish party obtained 4.9 per cent in 1884, the first election it con-
tested, only 3.5 per cent in 1889; from this moment on the party never
failed to increase the share of the vote until 1935 when it won 46.1

37
Kautsky, Terrorisme et communisme, Paris 1919.
38
Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, NLB London 1973, p. 112.
39
Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, p. 405.
40
Shorske, German Social Democracy, p. 43.
41 Xavier Mabille and Val R. Lorwin, The Belgian Socialist Party, in William E.

Paterson and Alastair H. Thomas (eds.), Social Democratic Parties in Western Europe,
London 1977, p. 392.

35
per cent. There again, there was a general expectation that as the sole
party representing the labour movement, it would achieve power
through an absolute majority of the electorate.42 The Swedish party
began meekly, offering candidates on joint lists with Liberals, it won
3.5 per cent in 1902, 9.5 per cent in 1905, 14.6 per cent in 1908, jumped
to 28.5 per cent in 1911 after suffrage was extended, increased its share
to 30.1 per cent and 36.4 per cent in the two successive elections of
1914, and together with its left-wing off-shoot won the plurality of the
vote, 39.1 per cent in 1917. The Norwegian Labour Party grew about
5 per cent in each election from 1897 when it obtained 0.6 per cent
onward to 1915 when its share reached 32.1 per cent.

Practice was confirming the theory. From election to election the forces
of socialism were growing in strength. Each round was a new success.
From a few thousand, at best, during the first difficult moments,
socialists saw their electorate extend into millions. The progress
seemed inexorable; the majority, and the mandate for socialism
embodied therein, were only a matter of a few years, a couple of
elections away. One more effort and humanity would be ushered into
a new era by the overwhelming expression of popular will. I am
convinced, Bebel spoke at the Erfurt Congress, that the fulfillment of
our aims is so close that there are few in this hall who will not live to
see the day.43

Social Democracy and the Working Class

The Socialist party was to be the working class organized. As

Bergounioux and Manin observed, workers autonomy outside politics
or a political emancipation that would not be specifically workers,
such were the two tendencies at the moment when Marx and Engels
contributed to the founding of the International Workingmens
Association.44 Marxs decisive influence was a synthesis of these two
positions: socialism as a movement of the working class in politics.
The orientation Marx advocated was new: to organize a party but one
that would be distinctly of workers, independent from and opposed
to all other classes. The organization of workers into a class, and
consequently into a political party45 was necessary for workers to
conquer political power and, in Marxs view, it should not and would
not affect the autonomy of the working class as a political force. The
emancipation of the working class should be, in the celebrated phrase,
the task of the working class itself.

We know why Marx expected workers to become the moving force

for socialism: by virtue of their position within the capitalist society,
workers were simultaneously the class that was exploited in the
specifically capitalist manner and the only class that had the capacity
to organize production on its own once capitalist relations were
42 Paterson and Thomas, Social Democratic Parties, p. 240.
43 Derfler, Socialism since Marx, p. 58.
44
Alain Bergounioux and Bernard Manin, La social-democratie ou le compromis,
Paris 1979, p. 27.
45
Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, The Revolutions of 1848.

36
abolished.46 Yet this emphasis on the organic relation between
socialism and the working classthe relation conceived of as one
between the historical mission and the historical agentdoes not
explain by itself why socialists sought during the initial period to
organize only workers and all the workers. The reasons for this
privileged relation between socialist parties and the working class were
more immediate and more practical than those that could be found in
Marxs theory of history.
First, capitalism is a system in which workers compete with each other
unless they are organized as a class. Similarity of class position does not
necessarily result in solidarity since the interests which workers share
are precisely those which put them in competition with one another,
primarily as they bid down wages in quest of employment. Class
interest is something attached to workers as a collectivity rather than
as a collection of individuals, their group rather than serial interest.47
A general increase of wages is in the interest of all workers, but it
does not affect relations among them. Alternatively, a law establishing
a minimal level of wages, extending compulsory education, advancing
the age of retirement, or limiting working hours affects the relations
among workers without being necessarily in the interest of each of
them. Indeed, some workers would prefer to work beyond their
normal retirement age even if they were excluding other workers from
work; some people who do not find employment would be willing
to be hired for less than the minimal wage even if it lowered the general
level of wages; some would be willing to fulfill their historical mission
of emancipating the entire society. In his Address to the Communist
League in 1850 Marx emphasized that workers must themselves do the
utmost for their final victory by clarifying their minds as to what their
class interests are, by taking their position as an independent party
as soon as possible and by not allowing themselves to be seduced for a
single moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty
bourgeoisie into refraining from the independent organization of the
party of the proletariat.48 Rosenberg reports the tendency of German
socialism in the 1860s to isolate itself and to emphasize these qualities
that differentiated it from all the groups and tendencies of the wealthy
classes. At this stage the radical proletarian movement tended particu-
larly to see the nobility and the peasants, the manufacturers and the
intellectuals as a uniform reactionary mass.49 The same was true
of the first labour candidates who competed in the Paris election of
1863.50 The notion of one single reactionary mass underlied the
Gotha Programme of 1875 and reappeared in the Swedish programme
of 1889.51 Still in 1891, when Engels was asked to comment on
Kautskys draft of the Erfurt Programme, he objected to a reference
to the people in general by asking who is that?52 And with his
46
Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, New York
and London 1972, p. 23.
47
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, NLB London 1976.
48
Karl Marx, Address to the Communist League, The Revolutions of 1848.
49
Arthur Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, Boston 1965, p. 161.
50
Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism, p. 165.
51
Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, p. 367.
52
Frederick Engels, A Contribution to the Critique of the Social Democratic Draft
Programme of 1891, Moscow n.d., p. 56.
37
typical eloquence, Jules Guesde argued in Lille in 1890: The Revolu-
tion which is incumbent upon you is possible only to the extent that
you will remain yourselves, class against class, not knowing and not
wanting to know the divisions that may exist in the capitalist world.53
Indeed, the initial difficulty which socialists faced was that workers
were distrustful of any influences originating outside their class.
Socialism seemed an abstract and an alien ideology in relation to daily
experience. It was not apparent to workers that an improvement of
their conditions required that the very system of wage labour must be
abolished. Bergounioux and Manin report that according to a study of
French workers at the beginning of the Third Republic there was a
resistance among workers to the socialist message, an emphasis on the
direct conflict between workers and employers, and a neglect of
politics.54 In Belgium, a party bearing a socialist label, Parti socialiste
belge, was founded in 1879 but had difficulty persuading workers
associations to affiliate. According to Landauer workers were mis-
trustful of socialist propaganda, and de Paepe argued that the word
socialist frightens many workers.55 Thus was born in 1885 the Parti
ouvrier belge: a workers party in place of a socialist one. In Great
Britain, trade-unionists objected to, and until 1918 were successful in
preventing, the Labour Party from admitting members of other classes
on an individual basis. If socialists were to be successful, theirs had
to be a workers party. In Sweden, the first local cells of the Social
Democratic Party were in fact called Arbetarekommuner, Workers
Communes.56 Socialists were anxious to emphasize the class character
of the movement and were willing to make doctrinal compromises to
implant socialism among workers.
The Dilemma of Proletarian Electoralism
The majority which socialists expected to win in elections was to be
formed by workers. The proletariatacting upon its interests and
conscious of its missionwas to be the social force precipitating
society into socialism. But this proletariat was not, and never became,
a numerical majority of voting members of any society. The prediction
that the displaced members of the old middle classes would either
become proletarians or join the army of the unemployed did not
materialize.
The old middle classes, particularly the independent agricultural
proprietors, almost vanished as a group in most Western European
countries, but their sons and daughters were more likely to find
employment in an office or a store than in a factory. Moreover, while
the proportion of the adult population engaged in any activity outside
the household drastically fell in the course of capitalist development,
those excluded from gainful activities did not become a reserve
proletariat. Extended compulsory education, forced retirement, large
53 Jean-Jacques Fiechtier, Le socialisme franais: de laffaire Drefyus la grande guerre.
Geneva 1965, p. 258.
54 Bergounioux and Manin, La social-democratie ou le compromis, p. 25.
55 Landauer, European Socialism, I, pp. 4578.
56 Raymond Fusilier, La parti socialists suedois. Son organisation, Paris 1954, p. 29.

38
standing armies, effective barriers to economic participation of women,
all had the effect of reducing entry into the proletariat.57 As a result,
from 1890 to 1980 the proletariat continued to be a minority of the
population. In Belgium, the first European country to have built
substantial industry, the proportion of workers did break the magic
number of the majority when it reached 50.1 per cent in 1912. Since
then it has declined systematically, down to 19.1 per cent in 1971. In
Denmark, the proportion of workers in the electorate never exceeded
29 per cent. In Finland, it never surpassed 24 per cent. In France, this
proportion declined from 39.4 per cent in 1893 to 24.8 per cent in
1968. In Germany, workers increased as a proportion of the electorate
from 25.5 per cent in 1871, to 36.9 per cent in 1903, and since then has
constituted about one third of the electorate. In Norway, workers con-
stituted 33 per cent of the electorate in 1894 and their proportion peaked
in 1900 at 34.1 per cent. In Sweden, the proportion of workers in the
electorate grew from 28.9 per cent in 1908 to 40.4 per cent in 1952;
then it declined to 38.5 per cent in 1964.
The rules of the democratic game, while universal and at times fair,
show no compassion. If a party is to govern alone, unburdened by the
moderating influence of alliances and the debts of compromise, it must
obtain some specific proportion of the vote, not much different from
50 per cent. Electoral institutions preceded the birth of parties which
sought to use them as the vehicle toward socialism, and those institu-
tions carried within themselves the fundamental rule which makes the
victory of an isolated minority impossible. A party representing a class
which has fewer members than the other classes combined cannot win
electoral battles.
The combination of minority status with majority rule constitutes the
historical condition under which socialists have to act. This objective
condition imposes upon socialists parties a choice: socialists must
choose between a party homogeneous in its class appeal, but sentenced
to perpetual electoral defeats, and a party that struggles for electoral
success at the cost of diluting its class character. This choice is not
between revolution and reform. There is no a priori reason, and no
historical evidence, to suppose that an electoral class-pure party of
workers would be any more revolutionary than a party heterogeneous
in its class base. Indeed, class-pure electoral parties of workers, of
which the SPD during the Weimar period is probably the prime
example,58 can be totally committed to the defence of particularistic
interests of workers within the confines of capitalist society. Such class
parties can easily become mere electoral interest groups, pressuring
for a larger share of the national product without any concern for the
manner in which it is produced. A pure party of workers who con-
stituted a majority of the electorate would perhaps have maintained
its ultimate commitment without a compromise, as socialists said
they would when they saw the working class as majoritarian. But to
57
Adam Przeworski and Ernest Underhill, The Process of Class Formation from
Karl Kautskys The Class Struggle to Recent Controversies, Politics and Society, 7,
1977, pp. 343402; and The Evolution of European Class Structure during the
Twentieth Century, unpublished MSS, University of Chicago 1979.
58
Richard N. Hunt, German Social Democracy, 191833, Chicago 1970.

39
continue as a minority party dedicated exclusively to ultimate goals, in
a game in which one needs a majoritymore, an overwhelming man-
dateto realize these goals, would have been absurd. To gain electoral
influence for whatever aims, from the ultimate to the most immediate,
working class parties must seek support from members of other classes.
Given the minority status of workers within the class structure of
capitalist societies, the decision to participate in elections thus alters
the very logic of the problem of revolutionary transformation. The
democratic system played a perverse trick on socialist intentions: the
emancipation of the working class could not be the task of workers
themselves if this emancipation was to be realized through elections.
The only question left was whether a majority for socialism could be
recruited by seeking electoral support beyond the working class.
There is a peculiar tendency among contemporary observers, to see
the strategy of appealing to a heterogeneous class base as a relatively
recent effect of the deradicalization of socialist movements. The
German Mittelklasse Strategie is seen as the prototype of this new
orientation and Kurt Schumacher as its architect.59 In this interpre-
tation socialist parties began to enlist support from groups other than
workers only after they have given up their socialist goals.
This view is simply inaccurate. Socialists sought support beyond the
working class as soon as the prospect of electoral victory became real
and ever since they have continued to go back and forth between
a search for allies and the emphasis on the working class. That
triumphant forcecast made by Engels in 1895 which predicted that
socialists would become a force before which all powers will have to
bow was conditional in his view upon the success of the party in
conquering the greater part of the middle strata of society, petty
bourgeoisie and small peasants. His advice to the French party
advice the French did not need since they were already heeding it60
was the same: recruit the small peasants. The Erfurt Programme of
1891 set the tone in which appeals to the middle classes were couched:
their interests paralleled those of the proletariat; they were the
natural allies of the proletariat.61 Guesdists in France began to
advocate alliances as soon as Guesde was elected to the Parliament in
1893.62 In Belgium, the first programme adopted in 1894 by the Parti
ouvrier appealed to the lower middle class and the intelligentsia.63
In Sweden, a multi-class strategy was debated as early as 1889, and the
party kept moving toward a heterogeneous class orientation until its
full acceptance in 1920.64 The British Labour Party did defeat, in 1912,
a proposal to open the membership, on an individual basis, to man-
agers, foremen, [and] persons engaged in commercial pursuits on their

59 William E. Patterson, The German Social Democratic Party, in Paterson and

Thomas, Social Democratic Parties in Western Europe.
60
Carl Landauer, The Guesdists and the Small Farmer: Early Erosion of French
Marxism, International Review of Social History, 6 (1961), pp. 21225.
61
Kautsky, The Class Struggle.
62
Derfler, Socialism since Marx, p. 48.
63
Landauer, European Socialism, I, p. 468.
64
Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats.

40
own account.65 But in 1918, as it took a programmatic turn to the left,
Labour opened its ranks to workers by brain. Indeed, in his polemic
with Beer, McKibbin interprets the very emphasis on socialism in the
1918 programme as an attempt to capture the professional middle
classes.66 Revisionists everywhere asserted that workers were not a
majority and that the party must seek support beyond the working
class. Bernstein, Jaurs, and MacDonald came to this conclusion
independently: once a party committed itself to electoral competition
they had to embrace this conclusion. By 1915, Michels could already
characterize social democratic strategy as follows: For motives pre-
dominantly electoral, the party of the workers seeks support from the
petty bourgeois elements of society, and this gives rise to more or
less extensive reactions upon the party itself. The Labour Party
becomes the party of the people. Its appeals are no longer addressed
to the manual workers, but to all producers, to the entire working
population, these phrases being applied to all the classes and all the
strata of society except the idlers who live upon the income from
investments.67

The post-war orientation of several social democratic parties toward

broadly understood middle strata is not a result of a new strategic
posture but rather a reflection of the changing class structure of
Western Europe. The proportion of the population engaged in
agriculture declined during the twentieth century, more rapidly during
the 1950s than during any of the preceding decades. The new middle
classes almost replaced the old one numerically. Party strategies
reflected, albeit with some lag, the numerical evolution of class
structure. What is relatively new, therefore, is only the explicit indi-
cation of salaried employees as a pool of potential socialist support.
It was Bernstein after all who introduced the notion of the Volkspartei,
not Schumacher or Brandt. The search for allies is inherent to elec-
toralism.

Dissolving the Class Appeal

Once they decided to compete for the votes of natural allies, whether
these were the old or the new middle classes, socialists were appealing
to the overwhelming majority of the population. Brantings estimate
in 1889 that the people constituted ninety-five per cent of the Swedish
society was probably only slightly exaggerated, given his definition of
the people.68 Seeking an equitable distribution of the burden of World
War I debt, Labour and the New Social Order, a programmatic document
of the party, asserted that In this manner the Labour Party claims the
support of four-fifths of the whole nation.69 There is no reason to
doubt that today the working class together with its allies comprise
around eighty per cent of the population of France or of the United

65
Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, London 1974, p. 95.
66
Samuel Beer, British Politics in the Collectivist Age, New York 1969 (2nd ed.);
McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, p. 97.
67
Michels, Political Parties, p. 254.
68
Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, p. 135.
69
Arthur Henderson, The Aims of Labor, New York 1918 (2nd ed.), p. 125.

41
States.70 If to industrial workers we add white-collar employees, petty
bourgeois, housewives, retirees, and students, almost no one is left
to represent interests antagonistic to socialism. Exploiters remain but
a handful: the businessman with a tax-free expense account, the
speculator with tax-free capital gains and the retiring company director
with a tax-free redundancy payment, in the words of the 1959 Labour
Party electoral manifesto.71
Yet social democratic parties have never obtained the votes of four-fifths
of the electorate in any country. Only in a few instances have they won
the support of one-half of the people who actually went to the polls.
They are far from obtaining the votes of all whom they claim to
represent. Moreover, they cannot even win the votes of all workers
the proletariat in the classical sense of the word. In several countries
as many as one-third of manual workers vote for bourgeois parties.
In Belgium as many as one half of the workers do not vote socialist.72
In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party lost 49 per cent of the work-
ing class vote in the 1979 election. Social democrats appear condemned
to minority status when they are a class party, and they seem equally
relegated when they seek to be the party of the masses, of the entire
nation. As a pure party of workers they cannot win the mandate for
socialism, but as a party of the entire nation they have not won it
either.
Some of the reasons why no political party ever won a majority with a
programme of socialist transformation are undoubtedly external to the
electoral system. Yet social democratic parties face a purely electoral
dilemma. Class shapes the political behaviour of individuals only as
long as people who are workers are organized politically as workers.
If political parties do not mobilize people qua workers but as the
masses, the people, consumers, taxpayers, or simply citizens,
then workers are less likely to identify themselves as class members and,
eventually, less likely to vote as workers. By broadening their appeal
to the masses, social democrats weaken the general salience of class
as a determinant of the political behaviour of individuals.
The strategies oriented toward broad electoral support have an effect
not only upon the relation between workers and other classes but
primarily within the class, upon the relations among workers. In order
to be successful in electoral competition, social democratic parties
must present themselves to different groups as an instrument for the
realization of their immediate economic interests, immediate in the
sense that these interests can be realized when the party is victorious
in the forthcoming election. Supra-class alliances must be based on a
convergence of immediate economic interests of the working class and
of other groups. Social democrats must offer credits to the petty
70 Parti Communiste Franais, Traite deconomie politique: le capitalisme monopoliste
detat, 2 vols., Paris 1971; Erik Olin Wright, Class Boundaries in Advanced
Capitalism, NLR 98 (1976), pp. 342.
71 F. W. S. Craig (ed.), British Parliamentary Election Results, 19181949, Glasgow

1969, p. 130.
72 Keith Hill, Belgium: Political Change in a Segmented Society, in Richard

Rose (ed.), Electoral Behavior: a Comparative Handbook, New York 1974, p. 83.

42
bourgeoisie, pensions to salaried employees, minimal wages to workers,
protection to consumers, education to the young, family allowances
to families. This convergence cannot be found in measures that
strengthen the cohesion and combativeness of workers against other
classes. When social democrats extend their appeal, they must promise
to struggle not for objectives specific to workers as a collectivity
those that constitute the public goods for workers as a classbut only
those which workers share as individuals with members of other classes.
The common grounds can be found in a shift of the tax burden from
indirect to direct taxation, in consumer protection laws, in spending
on public transport, and the like. These are concerns which workers
as individuals share with others who receive low incomes, who
purchase consumer products, who travel to work. They are not
interests of workers as a class but of the poor, of consumers, com-
muters, etc.
None of this implies that the party no longer represents workers when
it appeals to the masses. Although the convergence is never perfect
and some interests of workers are often compromised, the party con-
tinues to represent those interests which workers as individuals share
with other people. Hence social democratic parties oriented toward
the people continue to be parties of workers as individuals. But they
cease to be the organization of workers as a class which disciplines
individuals in their competition with each other by posing them against
other classes. It is the very principle of class conflictthe conflict
between internally cohesive collectivitiesthat becomes compromised
as parties of workers become parties of the masses.
Differentiation of class appeal, however, affects not only the organiz-
ation of workers as a class. It has a fundamental effect on the form of
political conflicts in capitalist societies since it reinstates a classless
vision of politics. When social democratic parties become parties of
the entire nation, they reinforce the vision of politics as a process of
defining the collective welfare of all members of the society. Politics,
once again, is defined on the dimension individual-nation, not in
terms of class.
This de-emphasis of class conflict in turn affects workers. As class
identification becomes less salient, socialist parties lose their unique
appeal to workers. Social democratic parties are no longer qualitatively
different from other parties; class loyalty is no longer the strongest
base of self-identification. One can no longer recall, as Vivian Gornick
did of her childhood, that: Before I knew I was Jewish or a girl I
knew that I was a member of the working class.73 Workers see society
as composed of individuals; they view themselves as members of
collectivities other than class; they behave politically on the basis of
religious, ethnic, regional, or some other affinity. They become
Catholics, Southerners, Francophones, or simply citizens.
It is now clear that the dilemma comes back with a vengeance within
the very system of electoral competition. The choice between class
73 Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, New York 1977, p. 3.

43
purity and broad support must be lived continually by social demo-
cratic parties because when they attempt to increase their electoral
support beyond the working class these parties reduce their capacity to
mobilize workers. This choice was not made once and for all by any
party; nor does it represent a unidirectional evolution. Indeed, if there
exists an electoral trade-off between appealing to the masses and
recruiting workers, then strategic shifts are imperative from the purely
electoral point of view. Histories of particular parties are replete with
strategic reversals, with major changes of direction, controversies,
schisms, and scissions. SPD returned to an emphasis on class in 1905;
Swedish Social Democrats temporarily abandoned their attempt to
become a multi-class party once in 1926, and then again in 1953; the
Norwegian Labour Party emphasized its class orientation in 1918;
German young socialists launched a serious attack on the Mittleklass
Strategie a decade ago; conflicts between an ouvrierist and a multiclass
tendency today wrench several parties. In terms of purely electoral
considerations social democrats face a dilemma. They are forced to go
back and forth between an emphasis on class and an appeal to the
nation. They seem unable to win either way, and they behave the way
rational people do when confronted with dilemmas: they bemoan and
regret, change their strategies, and once again bemoan and regret.
Social Democrats have not succeeded in turning elections into an
instrument of socialist transformation. To be effective in elections
they have to seek allies who would join workers under the socialist
banner, yet at the same time they erode exactly that ideology which is
the source of their strength among workers. They cannot remain a
party of workers alone and yet they can never cease to be a workers
party.
Reform and Revolution
Socialists entered into elections with ultimate goals. The Hague Con-
gress of the First International proclaimed that the organization
the proletariat into a political party is necessary to ensure the victory
of social revolution and its ultimate goalthe abolishment of classes.74
The first Swedish programme specified that Social Democracy differs
from other parties in that it aspires to completely transform the
economic organization of bourgeois society and bring about the social
liberation of the working class. . . .75 Even the most reformist among
revisionists, Millerand, admonished that whoever does not admit the
necessary and progressive replacement of capitalist property by social
property is not a socialist.76
These were the goals that were to be reached through legislation,
upon a mandate of an electorally expressed majority, as the will of
universal suffrage. Socialists were going to abolish exploitation, to
destroy the division of society into classes, to remove all economic
and political inequalities, to end the wastefulness and anarchy of
74
Szymon Chodak (ed.), Systemy Partyjne Wspovczesnego Kapitalizmu, Warsaw 1962,
p. 39.
75
Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, pp. 1189.
76
Ensor, Modern Socialism, p. 51.

44
capitalist production, to eradicate all sources of injustice and prejudice.
They were going to emancipate not only workers but humanity, to
build a society based on cooperation, to rationally orient energies and
resources toward satisfaction of human needs, to create social con-
ditions for an unlimited development of the personality. Rationality,
justice and freedom were the guiding goals of the social democratic
movement.
These were ultimate goals: they could not be realized immediately, for
economic as well as political reasons. And social democrats were
unwilling to wait for the day when these aims could finally be accom-
plished. They claimed to represent the interests of workers and of
other groups not only in the future but as well within present-day,
that is, capitalist society. The Parti Socialiste Franaise, led by Jaurs,
proclaimed at its Tours Congress of 1902: The Socialist Party,
rejecting the policy of all or nothing, has a programme of reforms
whose realization it pursues forthwith, and listed 54 specific demands
concerning democratization, secularization, organization of justice,
family, education, taxation, protection of labour, social insurance,
nationalization of industries, and foreign policy.77 The first programme
of the Swedish Social Democrats in 1897 demanded direct taxation,
development of state and municipal productive activities, public credit
including direct state control of credit for farmers, legislation con-
cerning work conditions, old age, sickness, and accident insurance,
legal equality, and freedoms of organization, assembly, speech, and
press.78
This orientation toward immediate improvements was never seen by
its architects as a departure from ultimate goals. Since socialism was
thought to be inevitable, there would be no reason why immediate
measures should not be advocated by socialist parties: there was no
danger, not even a possibility, that such measures could prevent the
advent of the inescapable. As Kautsky put it, it would be a profound
error to imagine that such reforms could delay the social revolution.79
Ultimate goals were going to be realized because History was on the
side of socialism. Revisionists within the movement were, if anything,
even more deterministic than those who advocated insurrectionary
tactics. Millerand argued, for example, in his Saint-Mand speech, that:
Men do not and will not set up collectivism; it is setting itself up
daily; it is, if I may be allowed the phrase, being secreted by the
capitalist regime.80
Even when social democratic movements left the protection of history
to rediscover a justification of socialism in ethical values, no dilemma
appeared in the consciousness of socialist leaders. Bernsteins famous
renunciation of final goals did not imply that they would remain unful-
filled, but only that the way to realize them was to concentrate on
proximate aims. Jaurs, speaking about the conquest of political power
by workers, provided the classical image: I do not believe, either,
77
Ensor, Modern Socialism, p. 345.
78
Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, pp. 11920.
79
Kautsky, The Class Struggle, p. 93.
80
Ensor, p. 50.

45
that there will necessarily be an abrupt leap, the crossing of the abyss;
perhaps we shall be aware of having entered the zone of the Socialistic
State as navigators are aware of having crossed the line of a hemi-
spherenot that they have been able to see as they crossed a cord
stretched over the ocean warning them of their passage, but that little
by little they have been led into a new hemisphere by the progress of
their ship.81 Indeed, for social democrats immediate reforms con-
stitute steps in the sense that gradually they accumulate toward a
complete restructuring of society. Anticipating Bernsteins argumen-
tation, George von Vollmar, the leader of the Bavarian wing of the
SPD, declared at the Erfurt Congress: Beside the general or ultimate
goal we see a nearer aim: the advancement of the most immediate
needs of the people. For me, the achievement of the most immediate
demands is the main thing, not only because they are of great propa-
gandist value and serve to enlist the masses, but also because, in my
opinion, this gradual progress, this gradual socialization, is the method
strongly indicated for a progressive transition.82
Reform and revolution do not require a choice within the social demo-
cratic view of the world. To bring about social revolutionthe
phrase which before 1917 connoted transformation of social relations
but not necessarily an insurrectionit is sufficient to follow the path
of reforms. Reforms are thought to be cumulative and irreversible:
there was nothing strange in Jaurs argument that: Precisely because
it is a party of revolution . . . the Socialist Party is the most actively
reformist. . . .83 The more reforms, the faster they are introduced, the
nearer the social revolution, the sooner the socialist ship would sail
into the new world. And even when times are not auspicious for new
steps to be made, even when political or economic circumstances
require that reforms be postponed, eventually each new reform would
build upon the past accomplishments. Mitigating the effects of
capitalism and transforming it piece by piece would eventually lead
to a complete restructing of society. Reviewing Milibands (1969) book,
Benjamin Barber best expressed this perspective: surely at some
point mitigation becomes transformation, attenuation becomes aboli-
tion; at some point capitalisms concessions annihilate capital-
ism. . . . This is not to say that such a point has been reached, only
that there must be such a point.84
Welfare Displaces Socialization
The social revolution envisioned by social democrats was necessary
because capitalism was irrational and unjust. And the fundamental
cause of this inefficiency and inequity was private property of the
means of production. While private property was occasionally seen
as the source of most disparate evilsfrom prostitution and alcoholism
to warsit was always held directly responsible for the irrationality
of the capitalist system and for the injustice and poverty that it
generated.
81
Ensor, Modern Socialism, p. 121.
82
Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, p. 258.
83
Fiechtier, Le socialisme franais, p. 163.
84
Benjamin Barber.

46
Already in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, one of the most important
theoretical sources of the socialist movement, Engels emphasized that
the increasing rationality of capitalist production within each firm is
accompanied, and must be accompanied, by the chaos and anarchy of
production at the societal scale. The contradiction between socialized
production and capitalist appropriation, Engels wrote, now presents
itself as an antagonism between the organization of production in
the individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society
generally.85 Speaking in 1920, Branting repeated that: In the
basic premises of the present social order there are no satisfactory
guarantees either that production as an entity is given the most rational
orientation possible, or that profit in the various branches is used in
the way that is best from the national economic and social point of
view.86

The second effect of private property is the unjust distribution of

material rewards which it generates. The economic case for socialism,
wrote a Labour Party theoretician, is largely based on the inability
of capitalism to bring about any equitable or even practicable distri-
bution of commodities in an age of mechanization and mass-
production.87 Even the most decisive break with the Marxist tradition,
the SPDs Bad Godesberg programme of 1959, maintained that the
Market economy does not assure of itself a just distribution of income
and property.

Given this analysis, socialization or nationalization of the means of

production was the principal method of realizing socialist goals and
hence the first task to be accomplished by social democrats after
the conquest of power. Social revolution, writes Tingsten was
always understood to mean systematic, deliberate socialization
under the leadership of the Social Democratic working class.88 Social-
ization or nationalizationa terminological ambiguity which was
significantwas the manner by which socialist revolution would be
realized.

Until World War I, as socialist parties concentrated their efforts on

winning suffrage and organizing workers as a class, little if any con-
crete thought was devoted to the means by which socialization was
to be accomplished. The very possibility of actually being in a position
to pursue a programme of socialization caught all socialist parties by
surprise when the war destroyed the established order, unleashed
spontaneous movements of factory occupations, and opened the doors
to government participation. Indeed, the wave of factory occupations
which occurred in Austria, Germany, Finland, Italy, and Sweden
appeared to the established socialist parties and trade-unions as almost

85 Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, In L. Feuer (ed.),

Marx and Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Garden City 1959, pp.
978.
86 Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, p. 239.
87 Sir Stafford Cripps, Democracy or Dictatorship?the Issue for the Labour

Party, Political Quarterly, 1933, pp. 46781.

88 Tingsten, p. 131.

47
as much a threat to their own authority and organization as to the
capitalist order.89

As these spontaneous movements were repressed or exhausted, the

logic of parliamentarism re-established its grip on the social demo-
cratic movement. Nationalization efforts turned out to be so similar
in several countries that their story can be summarized briefly. The
issue of socialization was immediately placed on the agenda of social
democratic parties in Austria, Finland, Germany, Great Britain,
Holland, Italy, and Sweden and of the CGT in France. In several
countries, notably Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden, socialization
commissions were established by respective parliaments, while in
France Lon Blum introduced in the Chamber a bill to nationalize the
railway industry. The commissions were supposed to prepare detailed
programmes of socializationin some cases for all basic industries and
in others for specific ones, typically coal. The British commission
finished its career quickly as Lloyd George simply ignored its recom-
mendations; in Germany the issue of coal nationalization lingered after
the resignation of the first commission; and in Sweden the socialization
committee worked 16 years, spending most of its time studying similar
efforts elsewhere, and expired without making any recommendations.
Although social democrats formed or entered governments in several
countries, the global result of these first attempts at socialization was
null: with the exception of the French armament industry in 1936,
not a single company was nationalized in Western Europe by a social
democratic government during the entire inter-war period.

How did it happen that the movement that aimed to revolutionize

society by changing the very base of its productive organization ended
the period of integration into the political institutions of capitalism
without even touching its fundaments? When Marx described in 1850
the anatomy of capitalist democracy, he was certain that, unless with-
drawn, universal suffrage would lead from political to social emanci-
pation; that once endowed with political rights, workers would
proceed immediately to destroy the social power of capitalists by
socializing the means of production.90 Still in 1928, Wigforss saw this
outcome as inevitable: The universal suffrage is incompatible with a
society divided into a small class of owners and a large class of unprop-
ertied. Either the rich and the propertied will take away universal
suffrage, or the poor, with the help of their right to vote, will procure
for themselves a part of the accumulated riches.91 And yet while
social democrats held power in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland,
France, Germany, Great Britain, Norway, and Sweden, riches remained
nearly intact, and certainly private property in the means of production
was not disturbed.
89
Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, Princeton 1975, p. 63; Gwyn Williams,
Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils and the Origins of Communism in
Italy, 191121, London 1975, pp. 12145; Paulo Spriano, Storia del Partito Com-
munista Italiano, I, Da Bordiga a Gramsci, Turin 1967, pp. 5063; Ernst Wigforss,
Industrial Democracy in Sweden, International Labour Review, 1924, 9, pp. 667679,
p. 672.
90 Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 184850, Moscow 1952, p. 62.
91 Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, pp. 2745.

48
One can cite a number of reasons. Not negligible was the theoretical
ambiguity of the very project of the expropriation of expropriators.
One difficulty lay in that ambiguous relation between socialization
the turning over of industries to their employeesand nationaliza-
tiontheir general direction by the state. On the one hand, as
Korsch,92 Wigforss,93 and others pointed out, direct control of
particular firms by the immediate producers would not remove the
antagonism between producers and consumers, that is, workers in
other firms. On the other hand, transfer to centralized control of the
state would have the effect of replacing the private authority of capital
by the bureaucratic authority of the government, and the Soviet
example loomed largely as a negative one. The gestionnaire tendency
dominated in Germany, where the principle was even incorporated
into the Constitution, and Sweden; the planiste tendency found its
most important articulation in Belgium and France under the influence
of Henri de Man. A veritable wave of constitution writing ensued in
the immediate aftermath of World War I: Otto Bauer in Austria (1919),
Karl Kautsky in Germany (1925), G. D. H. Cole in Great Britain
(1919), Henri de Man in Belgiumall rushed to devise some way of
combining rationality at the level of the society as a whole with the
control of the immediate producers over their own activities.
Yet this burst of theoretical activity came rather belatedly in relation
to the demands of practical politics. The fact, frequently admitted by
social democratic politicians, was that they did not know how to
proceed to the realization of their programme. The choice of industries
which were to be nationalized, methods of financing, techniques of
management, and the mutual relations among sectors turned out to be
technical problems for which social democrats were unprepared.
Hence they formed study commissions and waited.
Nevertheless, the cause of the social democratic inertia was much
more profound than the ambiguity of their plans. Socialists never
won a sufficient number of votes to obtain a parliamentary majority
and hence to be able to legislate anything without support, or at least
consent, of other parties. Remarkably, and quite to their surprise,
socialist parties in several countries were invited to take office as
minority governments or to enter governments as members of multi-
party coalitions. And the question of what to do as a minority govern-
ment presented itself as the following choice: either the party would
pursue its socialist objectives and be promptly defeated or it would
behave like any other party, administering the system and introducing
only those few reforms for which it could obtain a parliamentary
majority.
Each strategy was viewed in terms of its long-term effects. Proponents
of the maximalist strategy argued that the party would educate the
electorate about its socialist program and would expose the reaction-
ary character of the bourgeois parties. They claimed that the people
would then return the party to office with a majority and the mandate
92
Karl Korsh, What is Socialization?, New German Critique, 6 (1965), pp. 6082.
93
Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, p. 208.

49
to pursue its socialist programme. Only in Norway was this strategy
adopted; the government lasted three days in 1928; and the party was
returned to office four years later only after it had moderated its
socialist objectives.
Proponents of a minimal programme argued that the most important
task a party could accomplish was to demonstrate that it was fit to
govern, that it was a governmental party. We are not going to under-
take office to prepare for a General Election, said MacDonald in 1924,
we are going to take office in order to work.94 Their expectation, in
turn, rested on the belief that reforms were irreversible and cumulative.
As Lyman put it, Gradualists imagined that socialism could be
achieved by instalments, each instalment being accepted with no more
serious obstruction on the part of the Conservatives than Labour
opposition generally gave to Tory governments. Each instalment
would then remain, unharmed by interludes of Tory rule, and ready
to serve as the foundation on which the next Labour government
would resume construction of the socialist commonwealth.95 Hence
the party would come into office, introduce those reforms and only
those reforms for which it could muster the support of a parliamentary
majority, and then leave to return when a new mandate issued from
the electorate. We hope to continue only as long in office, but cer-
tainly as long in office, as will enable us to do some good work that
will remove many obstacles which would have hampered future
governments if they found the problems that we know how to face:
this was the intention of the Labour party in 1924, according to
MacDonald.96 Hence Blum introduced a distinction between the
exercise of power and the conquest of power: as a minority socialists
could only exercise it, but they should exercise it in such a way that
would eventually lead to its conquest.97
If socialists could not pursue an immediate programme of nationaliza-
tion, what could they do in the meantime? They could and did pursue
ad hoc measures designed to improve the conditions of workers:
develop housing programmes, institute some protection from unem-
ployment, introduce minimum wage laws, income and inheritance
taxes, old age pensions. Such measures, although they favoured
workers, were neither politically unfeasible nor economically shock-
ingthey continued the tradition of reforms associated with Bismarck,
Disraeli, and Giolitti. These measures neither modified the structure
of the economy nor the political balance of forces.
The fact is that until the 1930s social democrats did not have any kind
of economic policy of their own. The economic theory of the Left
was the theory that criticized capitalism, claimed the superiority of
94 Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, p. 101.
95 Richard Lyman, The British Labour Party: the Conflict between Socialist Ideals
and Practical Politics between the Wars, Journal of British Studies, 5 (1965), pp.
14052.
96 Richard Lyman, The First Labour Government 1924, London 1957, p. 106; for a

similar statement by Branting see Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats, p. 238.
97 Joel Colton, Leon Blum and the French Socialists as a Government Party,

Journal of Politics, 15 (1953), pp. 517543.

50
socialism, and led to a programme of nationalization of the means of
production. Once this programme was suspendedit was not yet
abandonedno socialist economic policy was left.98 Socialists behaved
like all other parties: with some distributional bias toward their con-
stituency but full of respect for the golden principles of the balanced
budget, deflationary anti-crisis policies, gold standard, and so on.
Of Blum it is said that he could envisage no intermediate stage between
pure doctrinaire socialism and the free play of capitalism . . . ,99 and it
seems that neither could anyone else. The only known theory of
reforms was that which called for nationalization; no other coherent
alternative existed.
Such an alternative did emerge in response to the Great Depression.
In Sweden, Norway, and to a lesser extent France, socialist govern-
ments responded to unemployment with a series of anti-cyclical policies
that broke the existing economic orthodoxy. It remains a matter of
controversy whether the Swedish policies were developed auton-
omously, from Marx via Wicksell, or were an application of the already
circulating ideas of Keynes.100 The fact is that social democrats every-
where soon discovered in Keynes ideas, particularly after the appear-
ance of his General Theory, something they urgently needed: a distinct
policy for administering capitalist economies. The Keynesian revolu-
tionand this is what it wasprovided social democrats with a goal
and hence the justification of their governmental role and simul-
taneously transformed the ideological significance of distributive
policies that favoured the working class.
From the passive victim of economic cycles, the state became trans-
formed almost overnight into an institution by which society could
regulate crises to maintain full employment. Describing the policies
of the Swedish government of 1932, Gustav Mller, the architect of
the unemployment programme, emphasized that previously unemploy-
ment relief was a system meant only to supply bare necessities to the
unemployed, and did not have the purpose of counteracting the
depression. . . . Economic cycles, it was said, follow natural economic
laws, and governmental interference with them is, by and large, purpose-
less and, from a financial point of view, even dangerous in the long
run.101 Both Mller and Wigforss102 described how the Swedish
Social Democrats discovered that unemployment could be reduced
and the economy invigorated if the state followed anti-cyclical
policies, allowing deficits to finance productive public works during
depressions and paying back the debts during periods of expansion.
Society is not helpless against the whims of the capitalist market, the
98 Bergounioux and Manin, La social-democratie ou le compromis, p. 110.
99 Irwin M. Wall, The Resignation of the First Popular Front Government of
Leon Blum, June 1937, French Historical Studies, 6 (1970), pp. 53854.
100 Karl-Gustaf Landgren, Den Nya Ekonomin I Sverige, Stockholm 1960; Otto

Steigler, Studien Zur Enststehung Der Neuen Wirtshaftslehre in Schweden: Eine Anti-
Kritik, Berlin 1971; Bo Gustafsson, A Perennial of Doctrinal History: Keynes and
the Stockholm School, Economy and History, 17 (1973), pp. 11428.
101 Gustav Mller, The Unemployment Policy, Annals of the American Academy

of Political and Social Science, 197 (1938), pp. 4772, p. 49.

102 Ernst Wigforss, The Financial Policy During Depression and Boom, Annals

of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 197 (1938), pp. 2540.

51
economy can be controlled, and the welfare of citizens can be con-
tinually enhanced by the active role of the state: this was the new
discovery of social democrats.
And this was not all: Keynesianism was not only a theory that
justified socialist participation in government but, even more fortu-
itously from the social democratic point of view, it was a theory that
suddenly granted a universalistic status to the interests of workers.
Earlier, all demands for increased consumption were viewed as inimical
to the national interest: higher wages meant lower profits and hence a
reduced opportunity for investment and future development. The
only conceivable response to crises was to cut costs of production,
that is, wages. This was still the view of the Labour Party in 1929.
But in the logic of Keynes theory higher wages, particularly if the
wage fund was increased by raising employment rather than the wage
rate (which did not rise in Sweden until 1936), meant an increase of
aggregate demand, which implied increased expectations of profit,
increased investment, and hence economic stimulation. The signifi-
cance of increasing wages changed from being viewed as an impediment
to national economic development to being its stimulus. Corporatist
defence of the interests of workers, a policy social democrats pursued
during the twenties, and the electoral strategy toward the people
now found ideological justification in a technical economic theory.
The Keynesian turn soon led social democrats to develop a full-fledged
ideology of the welfare state.103 Social democrats defined their role
as that of modifying the play of the market forces, in effect abandoning
the project of nationalization altogether. The successful application of
Keynesian instruments was seen as the demonstration that nationaliza-
tionfull of problems and uncertainties as it proved to bewas not
only impossible to achieve in a parliamentary way but was simply
unnecessary. Keynes himself wrote: It is not the ownership of the
instruments of production which it is important for the state to assume.
If the state is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources
devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward
to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is
necessary.104 As Wigforss argued further, state ownership of particular
industries would only result in the socialist government being forced
to behave as a capitalist firm, subject to the chaos of the market, while
by indirect control the state could rationalize the economy as a whole
and orient it toward the general welfare.105
The theoretical underpinning of this new perspective was the dis-
tinction between the concept of property as the authority to manage
and property as legal possession. Already Bernstein claimed that the
basic issue of socialization is that we place production, economic life,
103
Asa Briggs, The Welfare State in Historical Perspective, European Journal of
Sociology, 2 (1961), pp. 221258.
104
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,
New York 1964, p. 378.
105
Leif Lewin, The Debate on Economic Planning in Sweden, in Steven Koblick
(ed.), Swedens Development from Poverty to Affluence, 17501970, Minneapolis 1975,
p. 286.

52
under the control of the public weal.106 Instead of direct ownership,
the state could achieve all the socialist goals by influencing private
industry to behave in the general interest. The essence of nationaliza-
tion, wrote de Man in 1934 is less the transfer of property than the
transfer of authority. . . .107 If the state could regulate private industry
when necessary and if it could mitigate the effects of the free play of
market forces, then direct ownership would be unnecessary and
inadvisable: this became the motto of social democracy in the after-
math of the Keynesian revolution.
In sum, unable as minority governments to pursue the social pro-
gramme, in the mid-thirties, social democracy found a distinct economic
policy which justified its governmental role, which specified a number
of intermediate reforms that could be successively accomplished within
the confines of capitalism, and which provided in several countries a
successful electoral platform. Caught in the twenties in an all-or-
nothing position, social democrats discovered a new path to reform
by abandoning the project of nationalization for that of general welfare.
The Abandonment of Reformism

The abandonment of programmatic nationalization of the means of

production did not imply that the state would never become engaged
in economic activities. In contemporary Western European countries
between 5 and 20 per cent of gross product is now being produced by
enterprises of which the state is in some form a complete owner.108
The paths by which this public sector developed are too varied to
recount here. In Italy and Spain the public sector constitutes mainly a
fascist legacy; in Austria it consists predominantly of confiscated
German properties; in Great Britain and France a wave of nationaliza-
tions followed World War II. Characteristically, state enterprises are
limited to credit institutions, coal, iron and steel, energy production
and distribution, transport, and communication. Outside these sectors
only those companies which are threatened with bankruptcy and hence
a reduction of employment pass into public hands. Instances in which
the state would be engaged in producing and selling final-demand
goods are extremely rare; they seem to be limited to the automobile
industry. The state engages in those economic activities which are
necessary for the economy as a whole and sells its products and services
mainly to private firms. Hence, the state does not compete with private
capital but rather provides the inputs necessary for the profitable
functioning of the economy as a whole.
This division between the state and the market has been recently
enshrined in the public goods theory of the state.109 This theory
assumes that the capitalist market is a natural form of economic
106 Quoted by Korsh, What is Socialization?, New German Critique, 6 (1975),
p. 65.
107 Bergounioux and Martin, La social-democratie ou le compromis, p. 114.
108 Le Dossier des Nationalisations, Le Monde, Paris 1977.
109 Paul A. Samuelson, The Pure Theory of Capital Expenditure, in Joseph E.

Steiglitz (ed.), The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson, Cambridge (USA)
1966; Richard A. Musgrave, Provision for Social Goods in the Market System,
Public Finance, 26 (1971), pp. 304320.

53
activity; the existence of the market and its laws are taken as given.
The role of the state is supposed to be limited to the provision of
so-called public goods: those that are indivisible and which must be
supplied to everyone if they are supplied to anyone. It is proper for
the state to construct public roads or to train the labour force: rational
private entrepreneurs will not provide such goods since they cannot
prevent people from using roads or from selling their newly acquired
skills to competitors. The role of the state is thus supposed to be
limited to those activities that are unprofitable for private entre-
preneurs yet needed for the economy as a whole.
Hence, the structure of the capitalist systems built by social democrats
turned out to be the following: (1) the state operates those activities
which are unprofitable for private firms but necessary for the economy
as a whole; (2) the state regulates, particularly by pursuing anti-cyclical
policies, the operation of the private sector; and (3) the state mitigates,
through welfare measures, the distributional effects of the operation
of the market.
The regulatory activities of the state are based on the belief that
private capitalists can be induced to allocate resources in a manner
desired by citizens and expressed at the polls. The basic notion is that
in a capitalistic democracy resources are allocated by two mechanisms:
the market, in which the weight of preferences of decision-makers is
proportional to the resources they control, and the state, in which the
weight of preferences is distributed equally to persons qua citizens.
The essence of contemporary social democracy is the conviction that
the market can be directed to those allocations of any good, public or
private, that are preferred by citizens and that by gradually rationalizing
the economy the state can turn capitalists into private functionaries of
the public without altering the juridical status of private property.
Having made the commitment to maintain private property of the
means of production, to assure efficiency, and to mitigate distributional
effects, social democracy ceased to be a reformist movement.110
Reformism always meant a gradual progression toward structural
transformations; reformism was traditionally justified by the belief
that reforms are cumulative, that they constitute steps, that they lead
in some direction. The current policy of social democrats by its very
logic no longer permits the cumulation of reforms.
The abandonment of reformism is a direct consequence of those
reforms that have been accomplished. Since the state is engaged almost
exclusively in those activities which are unprofitable from the private
point of view, it is deprived of financial resources needed to continue
the process of nationalization. Having nationalized deficitary sectors,
social democrats undermined their very capacity to gradually extend the
public realm. At the same time, having strengthened the market, social
democrats perpetuate the need to mitigate the distributional effect of its
operation. Welfare reforms do not even have to be undone by bour-

110
See particularly Brandts view in Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky and Olaf Palme,
La social-democratie et lavenir, Paris 1976.

54
geois governments. It is sufficient that the operation of the market is
left to itself for any length of time and inequalities increase, unemploy-
ment fluctuates, shifts of demand for labour leave new groups exposed
to impoverishment, etc. As Martin put it with regard to Great Britain,
The basic structure of the full employment welfare state did not
prove as durable as Croslands analysis would lead us to expect. How-
ever, this was not because Conservative governments between 1951
and 1964 proceeded to dismantle it. . . . All that was necessary to under-
mine the full employment welfare state was for the Conservative
governments simply to do nothing to counteract these processes.111
Mitigation does not become transformation: indeed, without trans-
formation the need to mitigate becomes eternal. Social democrats find
themselves in the situation which Marx attributed to Louis Bonaparte:
their policies seem contradictory since they are forced at the same time
to strengthen the productive power of capital and to counteract its
effects.
The final result of this orientation is that social democrats again find
themselves without a distinct alternative of their own as they face a
crisis of the international system. When in office they are forced to
behave like any other party, relying on deflationary, cost-cutting
measures to ensure private profitability and the capacity to invest.
Measures oriented to increase democracy at the work-placethe recent
rediscovery of social democrats112not surprisingly echo the posture
of the movement in the 1920s, another period when the Left lacked
any macro-economic approach of its own.
Economic Bases of Class Compromise

As soon as social democrats formed governments after World War I,

they discovered that their concern with justice was not immediately
compatible with the goal of increased productivity. In Wigforss words,
Because Social Democracy works for a more equal and more just
distribution of property and incomes, it must never forget that one
must produce before one has something to distribute.113 The concern
for restoring and extending industrial productive capacity quickly
came to dominate the first discussions of socialization of industry in
Germany and Sweden.114 Certainly a just distribution of poverty was
not the socialist promise, and to enhance affluence social democrats
had to focus their efforts on increasing productivity.
But without nationalization of the means of production, increases of
productivity require profitability of private enterprise. As long as the
process of accumulation is private, the entire society is dependent upon
maintaining private profits and upon the actions of capitalists allocating

111 Andrew Martin, Is Democratic Control of Capitalist Economies Possible?,

in Leon N. Lindberg et al, Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism, Lexington
1975, pp. 1356, p. 28.
112
Brandt, Kreisky and Palme, La social-democratie et lavenir.
113
Timothy A. Tilton, A Swedish Road to Socialism: Ernst Wigforss and the
Ideological Foundations of Swedish Social Democracy, American Political Science
Review, 73 (1979), pp. 505520, p. 516.
114
Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, p. 194; Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats,
p. 230.

55
these profits. Hence the efficacy of social democratsas of any other
partyin regulating the economy and mitigating the social effects
depends upon the profitability of the private sector and the willingness
of capitalists to cooperate. The very capacity of social democrats to
regulate the economy depends upon the profits of capital. This is the
structural barrier which cannot be broken: the limit of any policy
is that investment and thus profits must be protected in the long
run.
The basic compromise of social democrats with private capital is thus
an expression of the very structure of capitalist society. Once private
property of the means of production was left intact, it became in
the interest of wage-earners that capitalists appropriate profits. As
Chancellor Schmidt put it, The profits of enterprises today are the
investments of tomorrow, and the investments of tomorrow are the
employment of the day after (Le Monde, July 6, 1976). This expec-
tationthat current profits would be transformed into future improve-
ments of material conditions of wage-earnersbecame the foundation
of the social democratic consent to capitalism.115 Social democrats
consent to the right of capitalists to withhold a part of societal product
because the profits appropriated by capital are expected to be saved,
invested, transformed into productive capacity, and partly distributed
as gains to other groups. Social democrats protect profits from revindi-
cative demands of the masses because radical redistributive policies
are not in the interest of wage-earners.

This is why social democrats trade-off the abolition of private property

of the means of production for cooperation of capitalists in increasing
productivity and distributing its gains. This is why social democrats
not only attempt to reproduce capitalism but struggle to improve it
even against the resistance of capitalists. Nationalization of the means
of production has turned out to be electorally unfeasible; radical
redistributive polices result in economic crises which are not in the
interest of wage-earners; and general affluence can be increased only if
capitalists are made to cooperate and wage-earners are continually
disciplined to wait.

Crisis and the Workers Government

Social democrats will not lead European societies into socialism. Even
if workers would prefer to live under socialism, the process of
transition must lead to a crisis before socialism could be organized. To
reach higher peaks one must traverse a valley, and this descent will
not be completed under democratic conditions.

Suppose that social democrats win elections and attempt to use their
position for a democratic transition to socialism. Given the social
structure of capitalist societies, such an electoral victory is possible
only if support can be obtained from several groups: industrial workers,
non-manual employees, petite bourgeoisie, farmers, housewives,
115
Adam Przeworski, Material Bases of Consent: Economic and Politics in a
Hegemonic System, Political Power and Social Theory, 1 (1979), pp. 2163.

56
retired people, and/or students. Hence pressures for a significant
improvement of material conditions erupt from several groups. Wages,
particularly the minimal or vital wages (sueldo vital in Chile, SMIC
in France), must be increased. Unemployment must be reduced.
Transfers, particularly family allowances, must be raised. Credit for
small enterprises and farms must become cheaper and available at a
higher risk. These demands can be financed by (1) a redistribution of
personal incomes (both through direct taxation and a reduction of
wage differentials), (2) increased utilization of latent capacity, (3)
spending of foreign reserves or borrowing, and/or (4) reduction of
the rate of profit.116 The sum of the first three sources will not be
sufficient to satisfy the demands. Redistribution of top incomes does
not have much of a quantitative effect, and it cannot reach too far
down without threatening the electoral support of salaried employees.
Forced to pay higher wages, and to keep employment beyond the
efficient level, capitalists can respond only by increasing the prices of
wage goods. Inflation is also fueled by balance of payment difficulties
resulting from the necessity to import wage goods and from specu-
latory pressures. Hence, either an inflationary dynamic sets into
motion or, if prices are controlled, scarcities appear, a black market is
organized, and so on. Eventually nominal wage increases become
eroded, as they were in France in 1936,117 in Chile and in Portugal.
Under normal circumstances it can be expected that the increase of
aggregate demand should stimulate investment and employment.
Redistributional measures, even if they include inorganic emission,
are usually justified not only by appeals to justice but also to efficiency.
As lower incomes increase, so does the demand for wage goods. The
utilization of latent capacity and foreign reserves are seen as a cushion
that would protect prices from increased demand during the short
period before investment picks up and eventually when supply rises.
It is expected that profits from a larger volume of sales will be rein-
vested and thus the economy will be stimulated to develop at a faster
pace. This was, for example, the Vuskovic programme in Chilenot
at all unreasonable under normal circumstances.
Such a program cannot be successful, however, when economic
demands grow spontaneously and when they are accompanied by
structural transformations. Wage demands are likely to become con-
fiscatory under such circumstances, and capitalists expect that these
demands will be enforced, or at least condoned, by the government.
Measures of nationalization, distribution of land, and monopolization
of credit and foreign exchange by the state threaten the very institution
of private profit. Under such circumstances, rational private capitalists
will not invest. A transition to socialism must therefore generate an
economic crisis. Investment falls sharply, prices increase, nominal wage
gains become eroded, and eventually output falls, demand slackens,
unemployment reappears as a major problem. What is not possible is
thus the programme articulated by Allende when he said that the
116
Serge-Christof Kolm, La transition socialiste, Paris 1977.
117
Michael Kalecki, The Lesson of the Blum Experiment, Economic Journal, 48
(1938), pp. 2641.

57
political model toward socialism that my government is applying
requires that the socio-economic revolution take place simultaneously
with an uninterrupted economic expansion.118 What is not possible is
the realization of Blums belief that a better distribution . . . would
revive production at the same time that it would satisfy justice.119
What is not possible is a transition to socialism that begins with une
augmentation substantielle des salaires et traitment.120

Faced with an economic crisis, threatened with loss of electoral

support, concerned about the possibility of a fascist counter-revolution,
social democrats abandon the project of transition or at least pause to
wait for more auspicious times. They find the courage to explain to the
working class that it is better to be exploited than to create a situation
which contains the risk of turning against them. They refuse to stake
their fortunes on a worsening of the crisis. They offer the compromise;
they maintain and defend it. The question which remains is whether
there exists a way to escape the alternative defined for the Left by
Olof Palme: Either to return to Stalin and Lenin, or take the road that
joins the tradition of social democracy.121
118 Stefan De Vylder, Allendes Chile: the Political Economy of the Rise and Fall of the

Unidad Popular, Cambridge 1976, p. 53.

119 Etienne Weil-Raynall, Les obstacles economiques a lexperience Blum, La

Revue Socialiste, 98 (1956).

120 Parti Communists Franais, Parti Socialiste Franais, Mouvement des Radicaux

de Gauche, Programme Commun du Gouvernement, Paris 1972, p. 1.

121 Brandt, Kreisky and Palms, La social-democratie el lavenir, p. 120.

58