Reform and Revolution

Welcome to Confronting Capitalism. I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chipper, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy. As a reminder, if you have any questions for Vec or suggestions for future topics on the show, you can send us an email at confronting.capitalism at jacobin.com.

V, we're coming up on our one-year anniversary of doing the podcast. Yeah, it's amazing. I think we've done around 24 or 25 episodes already, and that's massive. Yeah, no, and we've been able to touch on such a wide array of topics and we've had a lot of really great guests from Catalyst authors on. So, you know, here's to another year.

Yeah, it's a great time to have started the show because so much is happening in New York right now. And because it's New York, it has national and international implications. So it's a very good time to have a forum and a platform through which we can analyze some of this. Yeah, well...

Speaking of good times, today we're talking about, I would say, you know, a good time for the left in general. I'm sure there's plenty of people who would want to quibble with that. But today we're talking about social democracy. Yeah, one of the most important subjects for the left today, I think. And this is our initial foray into the subject. And we'll be approaching it again and again and again from different angles because there's so much to be gleaned.

And so many things to be learned from that now over 100 year experience with it. Yeah, absolutely. And today, I think the goal is to just kind of set the stage, talk very broadly about social democracy so that, you know. we can do future episodes that dig more into specific instances of social democracy, specific parties, challenges that the social democratic movement faced.

We're going to be talking a lot about this topic in future episodes as well. Yeah, looking forward to it. Yeah, so from the 19th century to the 21st century, there are a lot of different... parties and political figures that have been labeled as social democratic. So starting in roughly the 1860s, we have the German Social Democratic Party or SPD. In the 20th century, we have the European Social Democratic parties like the UK's Labour Party and the Swedish SAP.

And in modern times, we have figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders who have taken up the mantle of Social Democrat. What do all these organizations and politicians who call themselves social democratic have in common? What all these parties have in common is at rock bottom, a... critique of and an opposition to letting capitalism run unbridled. Now, that's a very, very low common denominator. Above that, there's a variety of

aspirations and ambitions that some of these parties had. If you take the German Social Democrats, a party that was founded in the late 19th century, they called themselves Social Democrats, because at that time, most everyone did. they were in many ways what we today would call communists. They were, in fact, not only critical of capitalism, they wanted to overthrow it. That's the highest aspiration that any of these parties ever had.

But the part of the left that retained that aspiration soon branched off into what was called communist parties or Bolshevism or things like that. That was after, of course, the Russian Revolution. Up until the Russian Revolution... Everybody was called a social Democrat. After the communists branch off in 1917, you have kind of a divergence between social Democrats on the one hand and revolutionary parties on the other hand. These social Democrats...

were the, you could say, the ancestors to the mid-century social democracies that we saw in Germany, in England, and you might even say the New Deal. And what these social democracies, the democratic parties had in common was a... either a grudging acceptance of or in some ways even an embrace of capitalism as a framing of their politics, but still committed to within capitalism.

trying to achieve greater equality, more security for workers, pensions, more rights against the market. So you could say that social democracy as it evolved over the course of the 20th century was a desire to and an attempt to modify capitalism so that it is not as corrosive and not as hostile to the interests and the needs of ordinary people.

and to harness the engine of its growth, the economic growth that comes with capitalism to a desire to have a more secure, humane, egalitarian existence for ordinary people. All of these social democratic parties, whether it was the Swedes or the Germans after the 1940s or the British Labour Party or the Austrians and the Belgians, they all had this in common. It assumed different institutional forms.

And, you know, you could say different degrees of ambition as well. So when we're talking about social democracy, are we mostly talking about a political movement or phenomenon that happened primarily in... Europe and to a debatable extent in America? No, the broad umbrella that we're talking about of trying to harness capitalism and within capitalism have more equality, more egalitarianism.

more security, that's something that became a global phenomenon. So you could think of social democracy's chief institutional form as the welfare state. What we today call the welfare state is really a product of the social democratic movement. And that's been there in the North and in the South. You've had in countries like Brazil, so Lula, for example, is an inheritor of the social democratic tradition. Nehru, Nasser, all these mid-century third world leaders.

who were kind of left-wing, all built on the same ambitions as what we call today social democracy. So if you think of the 20th century as the century of the welfare state, that is the gift of social democracy to... the world, to capitalism, to laboring people all over the world. It's a global phenomenon. Yeah. It's interesting that you say that because...

As with a lot of historical debates, there's so many debates about sort of the origins of the welfare state. And there are a lot of attempts to trace the welfare state.

way back in time you know to things like the church you know to things that precede capitalism but it kind of sounds like what you're saying is that the welfare state is really the direct product of social democracy is that

Am I interpreting you right? That's correct. I think it's a mistake to trace social democracy back to the church and such thing because then you're just associating social democracy or the welfare state with charity or with good deeds or something and that is absolutely not the case.

Modern social democracy explicitly went against the notion of charity. Charity is what? Handouts. The idea was that people should, of their own volition, out of the goodness of their heart, try to do better for others. Social democracy said no. Jobs? Incomes, security, medical care, pensions, these are rights. They should not depend on the goodwill of certain individuals or handouts. And that's why it's a horrible, it's part of the American lexicon to associate the welfare state with handouts.

or with charity. It keeps coming up. I don't want a handout. It's not a handout. It's something you've earned. You work your whole life. You create revenue. That revenue goes to the state in the form of taxation, and it comes back to you in the form of social services. This is the opposite of charity. It was an extension of citizenship. The early 20th century left was saying it's not enough to have political rights. It's not enough to have as a right.

the idea that I should participate in the state, participate in the making of laws, I should also have a right, certain economic securities that comes with my being a productive member of society. Charity is the opposite of that. Charity is you don't deserve anything. I'm going to give you something if it's out of the goodness of my heart. So you cannot associate it with the church. Now, underneath it, there is some kind of moral commonality.

And when Ingalls wrote socialism, scientific and utopian, he made the point that Christians and socialists have certain things in common. Both of them want to see the poor treated as human beings. Both of them want to see a sense of kind of a... organic community both of them want to see other orientedness on the part of individuals towards their fellow citizens towards their fellow residents but the difference is this christianity and you know all religions come down to

trying to change the world through individual acts, being nice, being charitable. But all of it comes out of the voluntary contribution that individuals make towards other individuals. What socialism was, he said, it was based on the idea that society has to be changed collectively and that the...

advances that we make, the economic security that we get should be given as a right and not as a privilege. And charitable contributions, when I take from charity, it's being treated as a privilege for me to be the recipient of that charity. So while there's a... underlying commonality to the morality and to the moral vision of the two, there's a very different perspective as to how it's to be achieved and whether or not it should be seen as a right or as a privilege.

Those are two very different things. Now that's why I think the welfare state has to be traced to the birth of the modern labor movement. Technically, in the historiography of it, the first kind of welfare schemes are attributed to Bismarck.

who was the chancellor of Prussia in the late 19th century. Now, that makes it seem like the welfare state came from the right. But the only reason Bismarck extended welfare payments and... redistribution social insurance to the workers was that he was afraid that unless he did this, the newly formed and growing Social Democratic Party would keep gaining in popularity and gaining in power. Right. And that's a consistent theme in this history, right, is that...

Even when reforms do come from the top, they only come because of pressure from below, because of pressure from working class movements. Yeah. For Bismarck, even though it looks like it's originating from a kind of scion of the right. He's doing it because he's trying to take the steam out from the pressure that's building under the leadership of the Social Democrats. And it failed, of course, in that the party kept growing. But the point is...

This is recognized as the first real step towards the welfare state in the modern European world. And it's no coincidence that it comes right after the birth of the German... labor movement and the german social democratic party so the welfare state really is a creation of the working class not of the church and not of the right who are some of the most important figures in

the early social democratic political movement. I guess you would say that the first real intellectual debate around social democracy and the possibility of reforming capitalism to make it more egalitarian. occurred within the German Social Democrats. And it was really a debate that today still resonates in many parts of the left as a debate on how to get towards a better society if you take socialism to be that better society.

On one side was a man named Edward Bernstein, and the other were many leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, which included Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg and August Bebel. And that debate occurred because Bernstein...

in the 1890s is saying that, look, we're finally starting to get real democratic rights and the working class for the first time is getting the right to vote. Through that, it might be possible to use the vote and to use the... political rights of the working class to do two things first of all to transform the bourgeois state so that it's less of a naked instrument of class oppression and the state can in fact be brought under

the leadership of the working class if it utilizes its vote and it puts into office its own parties. We can use that to reform, to humanize, and you might say to civilize capitalism. Nobody denied that. Kautsky, Luxembourg, all of them are saying, yeah, we absolutely have to do that. The real point of disagreement was, what do you do once you're in the state? So Bernstein says, you can actually have an aggregative...

incremental process where you keep heaping reforms upon reforms. So you move from...

humanizing and civilizing the bourgeois state to transcending it altogether. Right. And sometimes that's called evolutionary socialism, another term. Exactly. So you kind of legislate your way to socialism. You keep... weakening the power of capital, you keep using your votes, you keep legislating to strengthen the power of labor, and you can actually use the bourgeois state to pass laws one after the other, which at a certain point will reach...

a point where you're no longer in capitalism. Now, this is a long-term incremental strategy toward socialism. And this is where the other members of the German party said, and this is a fantasy. You cannot use the state to transcend capitalism. You're going to have to have a rupture of some kind. You're going to have to have a sharp break, which will come about through revolution. So the contrast became revolutionary.

transcendence of capitalism with a kind of incremental transcendence of capitalism. Now, at that time, it's important to note, all parties in the debate regarded themselves socialists and anti-capitalist in the sense that all agreed we need to go beyond capitalism. So the vision of justice, the goal was shared by Bernstein, by Luxembourg, by Kajalski, all of them. The disagreement was simply on strategy. Is it realistic to say that we can...

use our legislative power and our votes to gradually weaken capitalism to the point where we can just kind of tip it over and go into socialism? Or is there going to have to be a sharp, perhaps military rupture in which- We have to rise up and overthrow the government and then institute socialism through a revolutionary act. That was the disagreement, right? Right.

What you're talking about is, you know, it's kind of known as the Reformer Revolution debate after Rosen Luxemburg's seminal essay, Reformer Revolution, which was published in 1900. And as you're saying, Luxemburg was on the side. that what was needed was some sort of revolutionary break, that it was not possible to come to power in the state and just use the state to transform capitalism into socialism. When did...

social democracy start to really diverge from a revolutionary model? And what was the significance of that shift? I think by the 19... 20s, you're starting to see a real divergence. And that's largely because up until, say, the failed German revolution of 1918, and maybe even the Hungarian revolution. It is a fact that states in Europe, whether in Western Europe or Eastern Europe, are in fact pretty vulnerable. It is still possible to imagine overthrowing the European ruling class and the...

process of state formation is by no means complete. So it's not crazy at that time to treat reform versus revolution as a menu of options, because revolution is actually on the cards. Really, I would say from 1905, which was the first Russian revolution, all the way into the mid-1930s, which is when the Spanish Civil War happened. Europe is, you would say, some kind of revolutionary.

process. There are actual openings for revolution. And it's a viable position to have to say the state is still weak. There's real openings and real possibilities for overthrowing the state. And we should try to build power towards that.

even though it continues all the way perhaps into the Spanish Civil War, really by the second failed German revolution in the mid-1920s, it's starting to become pretty clear to at least many members of the European left. that that possibility of rupture, the possibility of revolution is receding really fast. And you have to kind of start to deal with the reality that if you want socialism, or even if you want to...

change capitalism for the better, it's going to have to be done through incremental reforms, through some sort of process of legislation and aggregation. What were the main conditions? That were causing this change because we're talking about, you know, there was a certain set of conditions in which revolution seemed viable and.

I think it's not just the fact that the revolutions were changing, but that like structures were changing as well that were impacting, you know, the possibilities for these revolutionary attempts to succeed. Yeah. You know, I think really there are two or three changes that are absolutely key.

for the fact that revolutions are receding. And I should say, people on the left today still treat it as there's just these menu of options and you can choose one or the other. But there's a reality that you have to understand, which is that while- There were enormous numbers of real revolutionaries in the left in the 1910s and 20s and 30s, all the way into the 40s. Those revolutionaries were not able to bring about revolutions. Now you can have to...

explanations for this. One is that they were traitors, they weren't serious, they made all sorts of mistakes, which is weird because socialism and Marxism have to be pretty mysterious and baroque institutions and ideologies if nobody understands them.

Everybody fails to be an appropriate Marxist and an appropriate socialist. I think a more convincing approach is to say, these people are all very committed, far more committed than anybody on the left in the past two or three generations. They were very, very serious.

They spent untold energy and time trying to bring about revolutionary change, but they were unable to do it. Not that they were insufficiently committed or they weren't smart enough to do it. So something happened in the world around them that made revolutions... really something that was off the table by the 1940s. Now, what was it? I think two things are really important. One is the achievement of democratic rights across Europe made revolution

sort of a lot less necessary for social change than it had been in the 1890s and 1900s. It's important to remember, the European working class as a whole does not achieve democratic rights. until about World War I. Segments of it had democratic rights prior to 1910. There was a kind of a qualified franchise that allowed the wealthier workers to vote in some countries. But in many countries, even that wasn't allowed. Right. And we're also talking about the mail vote at that point.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, even men, working class men were not allowed to vote right into the 20th century. So in that situation, if you want to express dissent, if you want to force change... Normal avenues that we take for granted in a democracy don't exist. And so that pushes the impetus for reform towards revolution. The inability, the lack of access to democratic institutions pushes people.

towards extra democratic avenues of change but once you have democracy of course now people have other avenues for trying to press for social reform for ordinary reforms which are not even possible in an undemocratic situation. So once you have democracy, people can actually struggle for reforms effectively through institutions and through channels which are legal, which makes the risks, the hard work...

And the explosive uncertainty of revolutions seem like an unwarranted leap in the dark. They don't want to do that. But that's just one issue. The second thing that happens is that... Once the ruling classes make it out of the initial revolutionary opening of 1917, 1918, 1919, they move really, really quickly to suppress the labor movement and weaken it.

and to a large measure are successful through two channels. One is, don't forget, fascism. We get fascism from the early 1920s all the way into the 30s. And the European fascist movement was directed towards smashing. the labor movement, particularly its revolutionary wings of it. And it's largely successful in doing that. So on the one hand, you get a weakening of those revolutionary elements, the sharpest edge of the revolution.

which makes even more unappealing to those who remain the task of trying to overthrow capitalism. But the flip side of the rise of fascism was there was a consolidation of the bourgeois state. It was a consolidation. of the military, of its repressive apparatus, but also of its fiscal and monetary apparatus, which enabled it to kind of make it through economic crises, to make it through monetary crises. And it's these crises which weakened the state.

in the early part of the 20th century, all the revolutions in the West were preceded with economic crises. Now, the ability to ride out that crisis, to make your way out of it through using central banking, through using fiscal policy, makes the state a lot more stable. So the left is handed with this situation where a lot of the steam towards revolutionary change is taken out through the rise of democracy. On the other hand, the straight is a lot more economically and politically strengthened.

because of the rise of new instruments of economic governance. And it is a fact that fascism took its toll on the most militant elements within the working class movement. These are all real changes in capitalism.

They make revolution both unlikely and unappealing to a lot of the people who were previously committed to it. So it's not that you had... a kind of reformist takeover or revisionism or things like that, which you see in the historiography by some of the left, it is that capitalism itself changed so that the chances for revolution receded.

And by the 1940s and 50s, you kind of had to be a left that was accommodating to the reality that you're going to have to find non-revolutionary ways of getting towards, of moving towards.

socialism if you still remain committed to it right and the interesting thing is you know going back to our comments about bismarck and the origins of the welfare state you know this version of the state only exists because of wins from the left for expanded democratic rights and access to the state which wasn't necessarily like the direct intention right of advocating for those reforms was to create a more stable capitalism but

That's sort of one of the unintended consequences, it sounds like. Yeah. If you look at the German Social Democratic Party's Erfurt program, which is a program that they fashioned in 1891 and was kind of the... key founding document of the party as it launched itself as a modern, we would call it a modern socialist party. That program had two parts to it, and they were published as two parts of a book. One was...

okay, we're going to fight for reforms because by fighting for reforms that we win over the working class, we make their lives better. We show that we're not just ideologues, but we're actually, we're interested in their welfare day to day. Right. And so we're committed to reforms.

Then the other was a part that says, okay, we're going to build on those reforms and use their popularity, use our growing power to then push for revolution. So the first part was, you might say, is the kind of the Bernsteinian part that says, We are a party that every political victory that we experience, we're going to use it to improve the material welfare of the working class. We're going to fight for their material interests. Okay. But then the second part says, we are not, however...

going to be content or limited to improving capitalism, we're fully committed to having socialism. So they didn't see any contradiction between fighting for reforms at that moment. and also trying to wage a revolution. There is no intention of, as you might say, consolidating capitalism or making it stronger or some such thing. But you're right. In the end, what they ended up doing, every time they humanized capitalism, they did, in fact.

take away some of the impetus towards and the necessity of a revolution, because people are making enormous gains. You have to remember, revolutions, the people who die in revolutions are mostly entirely workers and peasants. So, you know, in today's left, which is a campus left, there's a romance of revolution, but they're bloody affairs. And it's the people who are trying to wage revolution that take it on the chin.

Right. So when you look around you in the world and you say, it's possible to improve my life without it, most people are going to say, yeah, then let me just try to improve my life without it. Yeah. And this is where you get modern day. And I mean, I'm sure that... The left of today didn't invent this, but accelerationist arguments, you know, like the kind of people who say, oh, well.

Trump getting elected is great because it's going to make everything worse. And that means that people are going to be more inclined to the left and to revolutionary. arguments. And I don't think that the social democrats of the 19th of the 20th century would have argued things like that. Accelerationism has no connection to reality.

None whatsoever. It's tomfoolery on the left, and it shouldn't be taken seriously at all. Again, it's just one of the many symptoms of the complete and total lack of connection with... everyday people that you see ideologies like this taking root. The fact of the matter is, when things get really bad, really, really awful for working people,

they cling ever more fiercely to what little they have. They don't decide to take leaps in the dark. It's just never happened. We'll have a separate episode on this at some point about when and how revolutions happen. But unfortunately... You would think that it would be people on the left who would be most attuned to the conditions in which revolutions occur, how to bring them about. But there's a level of just fantasy and magical thinking.

in today's left that just has no connection to reality when it comes to these issues. Hey, listeners, we'll be right back with the conversation. But I wanted to let you know that you can subscribe to Catalyst Journal for half off and get a full year of issues for only $20 by using the code Confronting Capitalism, all one word in checkout. Catalyst Journal provides essential insights and analysis on contemporary politics by leading scholars and thinkers.

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The link is also in the description. Now back to the show. I want to get back to what you were saying about the state. Did social network ads have... you know, a strong theory about the relationship between the state and capitalism, especially since they're placing so much strategic emphasis on using the state in order to make changes in capitalism and also...

you know, to use those changes as a way to build a working class socialist movement? We have to divide the social democratic movement into pre-war and post-war. And by war, I mean the Second World War, not the First World War. And I think in the pre-war, that is the social democratic movement of the first half of the 20th century, there was a very, I think, robust understanding of the bourgeois state.

and of the limits that it puts on the chances for progressive change and progressive legislation. It's not the kind of theory that you see written in academic texts today or since the 80s and 90s when Marxists developed what we call modern.

state theory. But modern state theory, as developed by people like Polanzas and Miliband and Fred Block or Klaus Offit, modern state theory really built on the insights or the assertions that early 20th century social democrats made assertions which were very sharp and very smart but weren't articulated into a full theory and what the left the latter part of the 20th century did was it

turned those assertions and affirmations into a theory so that it was making explicit what was implicit. So what was implicit in the early parts of the 20th century among social democrats, it was the understanding that the state Even a democratic state, which was in some way or form beholden to the voters, most of the voters were workers, in spite of the fact that workers had most of the vote, capitalists still had all the power.

That was essential to their understanding of it. This is not as well encapsulated in Lenin's State and Revolution, but the State and Revolution is not a representative text of how social democrats thought about the state. It was forced down the throat. of the global left because when the Bolshevik party became the most important and most famous communist party in the world, it became kind of a religious text.

It doesn't express the entirety of what social democrats thought because its own theory of the state is actually quite impoverished. It isn't a very well worked out theory of the state. The more widely understood understanding of the state... was that it was not a naked instrument of class rule, because once you got the Democratic vote, you couldn't just be a naked instrument of class rule. You had to have a more sophisticated...

mediation, most sophisticated approach to keeping the working class in line. You couldn't just keep using the military or the cops against them because they had the right to vote. So the more sophisticated one said essentially that even though the states... class bias can be somewhat mediated or somewhat weakened through the vote, it's still gonna remain a class state. And because it's still a class state, it's going to take real struggle, real power, real threats.

of economic disruption from the working class to get legislators and to get parties to give us reforms, to give us legislation that's going to make our lives better. So they did, and we know they understood this because that's the strategy they used.

All social democratic parties, all of them, regardless of whether they were fighting in their own minds for socialism or whether they were fighting in their own minds for merely a reform of capitalism, regardless of that, all of them had one thing in common. a very, very deep imbrication in or very deep anchor in the working class, a very close relationship to trade unions, and a commitment to using the power of trade unions and of workers in their neighborhoods.

and in their other institutions to press their interests onto the state. In other words, even though they were committed to using the power of the vote, they never exclusively relied on it because they knew that the vote would never be enough. to bend the state to their interests and to their needs. It would have to involve class struggle. It would have to involve actually taking on power where it really exists in capitalism, which is not inside the state.

It's inside the investment prerogative of capitalists. They all knew this. They didn't articulate it as well as the later left in the 1970s and 80s did. But they all knew this. And that was the theory. that informed their practice. And now that theory deepened, it grew as their experience with the state grew, and I think later on actually it got in many ways weaker, not better.

But in this part of their history, the first half of the 20th century, they had a pretty robust understanding of the bourgeois state. And the sad thing is the current left is not even at the level of the early left. of the social democratic left of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. So if they saw the state as a fundamentally bourgeois state, why did they also think that the state could be used?

to expand economic rights? I mean, in reality, they didn't see any choice. And this is a really important point here. Once they accepted the fact, and it was a fact, that... Revolutionary openings were receding really fast. The chances for actually overthrowing bourgeois states were becoming pretty remote. And we're talking now about the 1930s into the 40s. Once you see that, you have a choice. Either you give up the game.

And you say, well, we can't do revolution, so let's just leave the field and hand it over to forces of the right-wing parties and mainstream parties. Or you say, all right, revolution's out of the question. We're going to have to figure out a way. of advancing our interests in non-revolutionary ways now you know if you're just a college student you're in a little study group and you or you meet in your friend's basements and you say let's have a revolution

And then you go, well, suddenly it occurs to you we can't have revolution. Damn, I feel called out. You can go about your life. But when you're a trade union leader or a party leader with millions of people who come to your organization.

and whose lives are connected to your political decisions, it's not so easy or not so simple to give it up and say, well, we can't have revolutions, so let's just abandon politics. You kind of have to say, we're going to have to figure out how to deal with the situation. as we find it. So they understood that you can't just overthrow capitalism, but they also understood that there's a real possibility for making enormous changes within capitalism if we play our cards right.

And that's why their understanding of the state was important, because they saw that if you actually have real organization in the workplaces and in neighborhoods, businessmen see. that unless they give you something, you can make their profit-making really difficult, almost impossible. Economic disruption in the workplace, in the macroeconomy, not only shuts down

establishments, it also shuts down profit making. And capitalists have little choice but to come to the table and talk to you about what it'll take to bring you back to work. And what they're willing to do is give you real concessions, allow for real changes in exchange.

The Social Democrats saw this through experience and they were committed to building through it. Now, they didn't know how far they could take it. Many of them were still in the hope and at the expectation that they could use this towards an eventual tipping over. into socialism. So you could think of it this way, Melissa, you could say that by the 1940s, you had two wings of social democracy. There was a Bernsteinian wing, which used reforms and wanted to use reforms

as a step towards socialism. And then there was a more bourgeois wing, which said, look, all this talk about socialism is really kind of a sideshow. We have to come to terms with the fact that we're stuck. Capitalism is going to be the name of the game.

certainly for the foreseeable future, perhaps forever. And what we should think of is a way of simply having a better capitalism rather than trying to transcend capitalism. These became the two wings of social democracy after the Spanish Civil War, I would say, by the 1940s. What was the relationship like between social democracy and Marxism? Were these social democratic parties Marxist parties? Some of them were. Let me just say, it was a very, very deep connection.

Marxism was the lingua franca. It was the language of everyday political analysis that all the social democrats employed through the first half of the 20th century. But even though it was the common sense of Marxists, the parties themselves, to use your language, weren't necessarily Marxist parties. So you can think of it a continuum. There were some parties like the German Social Democrats and even really the Swedes in their first years.

These were explicitly Marxist or Marxist-inspired parties. The Germans, of course, Kautsky, Luxembourg, Bebel, Liebknecht, all these people, these are the great Marxists of the first half of the 20th century. So there's no doubt that they were Marxist. But even though the Swedes, historically, are remembered as a very pragmatic party, and that sort of gave up the Marxist mantle very early on, the fact is that from the 1890s into the 1920s,

It was one of the more Marxist inspired parties of the entire social democratic pantheon. And they saw themselves as a Marxist, especially socialist party informed by Marxism. So that's one end of the spectrum. Well, on the other end of the spectrum, you have the Brits, the British Labour Party. And in the British Labour Party, people like K.R. Hardy and Ramsay MacDonald, these were not Marxists. In France, it was something in between because...

Paul Lafargue was an important figure in the French socialist movement. And you had kind of a lineal relationship to Marx himself. Lafargue was his... Son-in-law. Right. Okay. His son-in-law. His son-in-law. Yeah. Yeah. So on the one side, you have the Germans and the Swedes. Somewhere in the middle, you have the French. And then you have the Brits on the other side, where there are very few Marxists. In Britain, the influence of the Webbs and Fabianism.

and of various kinds of non-Marxist socialism were there, but Marxism not so much. However, even though they were not Marxist directly, even the non-Marxists were very deeply influenced. by the analysis that Marx brings into the socialist movement. So you could really say that all the way into the 1920s and 30s, whether you're a revolutionary or whether you're a social democrat, you're in some way or form connected.

to the ideas of Karl Marx. You're deeply influenced by them. It's really afterwards, I would say after 1945, that you see a dramatic change in this. where Marxism becomes much more marginal to the social democratic world. But in the first part of the 20th century, they're all in some way or form traced back to the ideas.

of the Marxist movement inside socialism. And let me just say finally, even where they weren't directly or indirectly connected to Marx, they were all socialists. So even the British Labour Party- You don't have a lot of Marxists, but they identify their strategy as one that today's socialists would see as a Marxist strategy. So the British Labour Party still sees nationalization as a key goal.

for the Labour Party, even though it doesn't call itself a Marxist party. Every single one of the left-wing social democratic parties sees socialism as a desired end, and they're going to bring about socialism. How? Through class struggle. All of them. were class struggle parties. And class struggle comes straight out of the Marxist lexicon, straight out of the Marxist strategic perspective. So that whole world, the entire world of the left, was shaped by Marxism.

And the socialism of the early 20th century was overwhelmingly a socialism with a Marxist inflection, a Marxist caste, which is very different from, say, the 1850s, the 1870s. The last quarter of the 19th century... sees Marx as becoming the strategic saint, you might think, of the left, whether or not they were Bolshevik, whether or not they were in the communist movement.

Yeah, we talked a bit about the state, but we didn't really talk much about class except to mention that the social democratic movements were movements primarily based out of the working class. But how did social democrats understand? class, the class structure within capitalism? And how did that affect their politics? Well, I think it evolved over time. The early years...

that is to say the 1890s to the 1920s, they very much saw politics as class against class. And this comes straight out of Marx. They saw the socialist movement as a movement devoted to class struggle. Again, this is true. whether you're in the British Labour Party or whether you're in the German Social Democratic Party. There was a kind of a difference in intensity and in pitch, but they all saw politics as...

the politics of class against class. And we know this because all the Social Democrats based themselves in the trade union movement. In some cases, the Social Democratic Party essentially created the trade unions. Swedes are a good example where very early on, it's the party that's creating unions. But in the other cases like England, the trade union movement created the Labour Party.

Right. And it's more of a kind of marriage between the party and the labor movement. No, really, the party is the creature of the labor movement. In the British case, the unions retained their hegemonic position within the Labor Party all the way into the 1970s and 80s. through a variety of means. The Labour Party was really initially viewed by the trade unions as an instrument of the trade unions. The point is whether the impetus comes from the side of the party or from the side of the unions.

In every single social democratic movement, it was anchored in a partnership between these parties and the working class. And that was because all of them saw their lifeblood as coming from the... power, the strength, and the organization of workers. So in this iteration, at this moment, they are not thinking especially hard about the middle classes. There's a reason for that. Until the 1920s, they don't really have to worry about elections very much.

So if you're not worried so much about elections, you're really just thinking, how do we build the power of our constituency? Once you get democracy, you start worrying about the vote, about winning elections. And as soon as you start worrying about elections... you realize, well, we just don't have enough workers in the population to exclusively rely on them to win even electoral office. Because across Europe...

the working class never amounted to more than 45 or 50% of the electorate. So you had to have outside alliances in order to actually vie for power. And that outside alliance would come from only two groups, peasants, that is the agricultural sector. or from the urban middle classes, which is shopkeepers and professionals and things like that. So you had to start worrying very hard about recruiting or attracting those forces to your side. And at that moment...

The exclusive class-against-class view becomes somewhat less appealing. Mind you, right up until the 1960s and 70s, all the social democratic parties had still, their main anchor was in the working class. their vocabulary and their language of politics started changing. It changed from just exclusively a class language and viewing themselves as class parties to seeing themselves as parties of the people. Right. And this is why...

I think the debates about what classes who constitutes the working class become so important and have proven so lasting. I mean, we talked about this a lot in our episode on the PMC about. you know, just how much ink is spilled over this question of who counts as a worker. And I think it's important to know it's not just, you know, an academic terminological debate. Like it's a debate that is about.

who is actually controlling these movements and who these movements are working for. Absolutely. It's impossible to overstress this point. You sometimes see in today's left this idea that... If you spend your time worrying about who is or is not a worker, it's some kind of arcane academic thing. You have people like Russell Jacoby who kind of sniff at...

class analysis when you really do analysis like this because they say, well, this is just some kind of professorial thing. The truth of it is, if you want to see real debates on who is and is not a worker, go back to Mao. and his analysis of the agrarian class structure in pre-1949 China, you look at Lenin and his analysis of the Russian agrarian class structure, where he's trying to understand, well, is it the middle peasants who are the primary?

part of the agrarian population, or is it poor peasants? Why are they worrying about this? Because they want to know, how big is our constituency? How big is the working class? Who do we go in and organize? People don't walk around with labels on their shirts saying, I am a worker. where I'm a middle-class person, there's a huge section of the population that has what appear to be a mixed life.

And you have to be able to say, well, are these basically workers or are they basically not? Right. And I think this goes to one of the fundamental differences between a liberal conception of the electorate and a more Marxist conception of the electorate. because in the sort of liberal pluralist view, right, everybody is just a voter. Everybody represents one vote and we all get together and we say our opinions and majority rules.

you know, a Marxist conception and also like what these social Democrats recognize as well is that we're not all just equal. We're all coming from a certain economic position. And that, you know, unfortunately.

that means that some people's opinions are more powerful than others. And that means that we have to account for that in political strategy. Yeah, I would say it's not just difference with the liberals. I do believe that a great deal of... 20th century liberal discourse recognized the existence of class and recognized real differences between people who were economically located differentially inside the system.

Sure, a lot of liberals have made that mistake. Today, I would say it's the populist movement and the populist elements within the left who are the least interested in thinking about class because they tend to clump everybody who's not super wealthy. into the same basic group of people, which is the 99% or the people or something like that. And that's a drawback because what attracts differently located people to a socialist program is going to be quite different.

What's going to attract workers to it is very different to what's going to attract salaried people or professional people. And we actually know this. We'll talk about this later, perhaps in the next episode. The way in which professionals have responded to social democratic parties and programs.

in the 20th century has been very different from the way, say, manual workers have responded to it, blue collar workers have responded to it. Technically, they're all part of the 99%, but they've had very different connections. to the social democratic parties and very different demands that they bring to the parties. And unless you are ready for that, unless you anticipate it, unless you plan a program...

that acknowledges these differences, you're not going to last very long as a left-wing party. You're going to end up becoming hegemonized by people who repel the key constituency that you would like to have as your anchor, which is workers. Right. I mean, looking at today's left and, you know, let's just talk about the American left. Do you think that it's a social democratic left? No, I would say it's a minority, a minority of the left.

is a social democratic left. The bulk of the American left is what I call a neoliberal left. So if we define a social democratic left the way I did earlier in this episode, which is a left that seeks to reform capitalism, humanize capitalism, but understand that it's going to come through taking on the real centers of power, which is capital. Understand that it's going to require bringing together workers in the same organizations.

fight alongside them against these centers of power, that's still a pretty small minority. Most of the left in America still sees anti-discrimination and multiculturalism and these sorts of things as its horizon. which is, I mean, every single neoliberal in the world wants to see a less discriminatory capitalism. Every libertarian wants to see labor markets that...

reward people on talent and not on race or on gender. Every libertarian would love to see a truly multicultural ruling class, a truly multi-gendered political elite. These are all progressive demands, but they're progressive. within the worst kind of capitalism we have seen in the last 120 years. So yeah, they're good things to have. But the idea that this has any connection to social democracy is a historical phenomenon.

It's just ludicrous. I don't think there's any connection. But as I've said before, I think we are in a process of learning, of rediscovering some of these roots, of trying to recapture their energy and their power. and of trying to devise the politics around them. That will only happen if this neoliberal left, the identitarian intersectional left, is at some point in the future, near future, displaced by something of a class struggle left.

of a left that's committed to the material interests of working people and doesn't actually reject the very idea of material analysis and material interests. We're still having these debates, which means we're not even at the beginning. of a genuinely, I think, effective left for the working class.

Confronting Capitalism is produced by Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy and published by Jacobin Magazine with help from Cale Brooks and Melissa Nashek. Connor Gillies is our audio editor. Our music is provided by Zonke. Thanks for listening. you