Entrevista com
Vivek Chibber
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O teórico e político social-democrata alemão Karl Kautsky discursa em frente ao Circo Busch, em Berlim, Alemanha. (Gircke / ullstein bild via Getty Images) |
Entrevista por
Melissa Naschek
A política social-democrata faz parte do movimento socialista há mais de um século. Algumas características, como o compromisso com a busca de direitos econômicos para a classe trabalhadora por meio do Estado, permaneceram consistentes ao longo do tempo. Mas quando as ambições social-democratas de derrubar o capitalismo se transformaram em esforços para reformar o sistema?
Neste episódio do podcast Confronting Capitalism, da Jacobin Radio, Vivek Chibber analisa amplamente a agenda inicial dos partidos social-democratas. Por meio de um exame de suas visões sobre o Estado, a classe e o socialismo, ele desvenda a relação da social-democracia com a política de esquerda atual.
Confronting Capitalism com Vivek Chibber é produzido pela Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy e publicado pela Jacobin. Você pode ouvir o episódio completo aqui. Esta transcrição foi editada para maior clareza.
Melissa Naschek
Então, do século XIX ao XXI, existiram muitos partidos e figuras políticas diferentes rotulados como “social-democratas”. A partir de aproximadamente 1860, tivemos o Partido Social-Democrata Alemão, ou SPD. No século XX, tivemos partidos social-democratas europeus como o Partido Trabalhista do Reino Unido e o Partido Social-Democrata Sueco (SAP). E nos tempos modernos, figuras como Jeremy Corbyn e Bernie Sanders assumiram o manto da política social-democrata.
O que todas essas organizações e políticos que se identificam como social-democratas têm em comum?
Vivek Chibber
O que todos esses partidos têm em comum, em sua essência, é uma crítica e uma oposição ao capitalismo desenfreado. Esse é um denominador comum muito, muito básico. Acima disso, há uma variedade de aspirações e ambições que esses partidos tinham.
Se considerarmos os social-democratas alemães, trata-se de um partido fundado no final do século XIX por pessoas que se autodenominavam social-democratas porque, naquela época, quase todos se autodenominavam assim. Mas, em muitos aspectos, eles eram o que hoje chamaríamos de comunistas. Na verdade, não apenas criticavam o capitalismo, como também queriam derrubá-lo.
Essa era a maior aspiração que qualquer um desses partidos jamais teve. Mas a parte da esquerda que manteve essa aspiração logo se ramificou no que historicamente ficou conhecido como partidos comunistas, bolchevismo ou coisas do gênero. É claro que essa transformação ocorreu após a Revolução Russa.
Até a Revolução Russa, todos eram chamados de social-democratas. Depois que os comunistas se separaram em 1917, houve uma divergência entre os social-democratas, por um lado, e os partidos revolucionários, por outro. Esses social-democratas foram, pode-se dizer, os ancestrais das social-democracias de meados do século que vimos na Alemanha, na Inglaterra e, pode-se até dizer, no New Deal nos Estados Unidos.
O que esses partidos social-democratas tinham em comum era uma aceitação relutante, ou até mesmo uma adesão, em alguns casos, ao capitalismo como estrutura de sua política, mas também um compromisso em, dentro do capitalismo, buscar maior igualdade, mais segurança para os trabalhadores, aposentadorias e mais direitos contra o mercado.
Portanto, pode-se dizer que a social-democracia, conforme evoluiu ao longo do século XX, foi um desejo e uma tentativa de modificar o capitalismo para que ele não fosse tão corrosivo e menos hostil aos interesses e às necessidades das pessoas comuns, e de aproveitar o motor do crescimento econômico que acompanha o capitalismo para alcançar uma existência mais segura, humana e igualitária para as pessoas comuns.
Todos esses partidos social-democratas — fossem os suecos, os alemães, o Partido Trabalhista britânico, os austríacos ou os belgas — tinham isso em comum. Assumiram diferentes formas institucionais e, pode-se dizer, diferentes graus de ambição também.
Melissa Naschek
Então, quando falamos de social-democracia, estamos nos referindo principalmente a um movimento ou fenômeno político que ocorreu sobretudo na Europa e, em certa medida, na América?
Vivek Chibber
Não, o conceito amplo a que nos referimos — de tentar controlar o capitalismo e, dentro dele, promover mais igualdade, mais igualitarismo, mais segurança — tornou-se um fenômeno global. Portanto, podemos considerar a principal forma institucional da social-democracia como o Estado de bem-estar social.
O que hoje chamamos de Estado de bem-estar social é, na verdade, um produto do movimento social-democrata, que existiu tanto no Norte quanto no Sul globais. Em um país como o Brasil, podemos considerar Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, por exemplo, um herdeiro da tradição social-democrata. Outros, como Jawaharlal Nehru ou Gamal Abdel Nasser — todos esses líderes do terceiro mundo de meados do século XX, de tendência mais à esquerda — construíram suas ambições com base no que hoje chamamos de social-democracia.
Portanto, podemos considerar o século XX como "o século do Estado de bem-estar social", que é o presente que a social-democracia deu ao mundo, ao capitalismo e aos trabalhadores de todo o planeta. É um fenômeno global.
Melissa Naschek
É interessante você dizer isso porque, como acontece com muitos debates históricos, existem diferentes origens supostamente atribuídas ao Estado de bem-estar social. Por exemplo, há tentativas de rastrear a origem do Estado de bem-estar social até a Igreja ou outras instituições que antecedem o capitalismo.
Mas parece que você está dizendo que o Estado de bem-estar social é, na verdade, um produto direto da social-democracia. Estou interpretando corretamente?
Vivek Chibber
Isso mesmo. Acho que é um erro rastrear a origem do Estado de bem-estar social até a Igreja e coisas do tipo, porque aí você acaba associando a social-democracia ou o Estado de bem-estar social à caridade, ou a boas ações, ou algo assim. E esse não é o caso.
A social-democracia moderna se opôs explicitamente à noção de caridade.
Caridade é essencialmente dar esmolas. A ideia era que as pessoas deveriam, por vontade própria ou pela bondade de seus corações, tentar fazer o bem para os outros. A social-democracia rejeitou isso porque considerava empregos, renda, segurança, assistência médica e aposentadoria como direitos.
As social-democracias acreditavam que as pessoas não deveriam depender da boa vontade de certos indivíduos ou de esmolas. E é por isso que é horrível que parte do vocabulário americano associe o Estado de bem-estar social a esmolas ou caridade. Você ouvirá pessoas dizerem: "Eu não quero esmola". Não é esmola! É algo que você conquistou.
O século XX é "o século do Estado de bem-estar social", que é o presente dado pela social-democracia ao mundo.
Você trabalha a vida toda e gera a receita. Essa receita vai para o Estado na forma de impostos e retorna para você na forma de serviços sociais. Isso é o oposto de caridade. Era uma extensão da cidadania.
A esquerda do início do século XX dizia: "Não basta ter direitos políticos. Não basta ter a ideia de que devo participar do Estado ou da elaboração de leis, como um direito. Eu também devo ter certas garantias econômicas como um direito inerente ao fato de ser um membro produtivo da sociedade."
A caridade é o oposto disso. Caridade é: “Você não merece nada. Vou te dar algo se for pela bondade do meu coração.” Portanto, não se pode associar o Estado de bem-estar social à igreja.
Agora, no fundo, existe uma certa afinidade moral. Quando Friedrich Engels escreveu "Socialismo: Utópico e Científico", ele argumentou que cristãos e socialistas compartilham certas coisas em comum. Ambos querem ver os pobres tratados como seres humanos. Ambos querem ver um senso de comunidade orgânica. Ambos querem ver uma orientação diferente por parte dos indivíduos em relação aos seus concidadãos e moradores.
Mas a diferença é a seguinte. O cristianismo, e todas as religiões, se resumem a tentar mudar o mundo por meio de atos individuais — ser gentil e caridoso. Mas tudo isso vem das contribuições voluntárias que os indivíduos fazem uns aos outros. Então, quando eu recebo uma contribuição para caridade, considero um privilégio ser o beneficiário dessa caridade. Mas o socialismo, disse Engels, baseia-se na ideia de que a sociedade precisa ser transformada coletivamente e que os avanços que conquistamos, a segurança econômica que obtemos, devem ser concedidos como um direito e não como um privilégio.
Portanto, embora haja uma semelhança subjacente na moralidade e nas visões morais do cristianismo e do socialismo, existe uma perspectiva muito diferente sobre como isso deve ser alcançado e se deve ser visto como um direito ou como um privilégio. São duas coisas muito diferentes.
É por isso que acredito que o Estado de bem-estar social deve ser rastreado até o nascimento do movimento operário moderno. Tecnicamente, na historiografia, os primeiros programas de bem-estar social são atribuídos a Otto von Bismarck, que foi chanceler da Prússia no final do século XIX. Isso dá a impressão de que o Estado de bem-estar social surgiu da direita. Mas a única razão pela qual Bismarck estendeu os pagamentos de assistência social, a redistribuição de renda e o seguro social aos trabalhadores foi o medo de que, a menos que o fizesse, o recém-formado e crescente Partido Social Democrata continuaria ganhando popularidade e poder.
Certo, e esse é um tema recorrente nessa história. Mesmo quando as reformas vêm de cima, elas só acontecem por causa da pressão de baixo, dos movimentos da classe trabalhadora.
Vivek Chibber
Sim. Para Bismarck, embora pareça que a iniciativa se origina de uma espécie de herdeiro da direita, ele a implementou porque estava tentando diminuir a pressão que se acumulava sob a liderança dos social-democratas. E falhou, é claro, e o partido continuou crescendo.
Mas a questão é que isso é reconhecido como o primeiro passo real em direção ao Estado de bem-estar social na Europa moderna. E não é coincidência que tenha ocorrido logo após o nascimento do movimento operário alemão e do Partido Social-Democrata Alemão. Portanto, o Estado de bem-estar social é realmente uma criação da classe trabalhadora, não da Igreja e nem da direita.
Reforma ou revolução?
Melissa Naschek
Quem foram algumas das figuras mais importantes do início do movimento social-democrata e quais eram suas perspectivas?
Vivek Chibber
Acho que se poderia dizer que o primeiro debate intelectual real sobre a social-democracia e a possibilidade de reformar o capitalismo para torná-lo mais igualitário ocorreu dentro do Partido Social-Democrata Alemão (SPD). E foi um debate que ainda ressoa hoje na esquerda, sobre como chegar a uma sociedade melhor, se considerarmos o socialismo como essa sociedade melhor. De um lado estava um homem chamado Eduard Bernstein, e do outro, muitos líderes do SPD, incluindo Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburgo e August Bebel.
E esse debate ocorreu porque Bernstein, na década de 1890, dizia: vejam, finalmente estamos começando a obter direitos democráticos reais. E a classe trabalhadora, pela primeira vez, está conquistando o direito ao voto. Através disso, talvez seja possível usar o voto e esses direitos políticos recém-conquistados pela classe trabalhadora para transformar o Estado burguês, de modo que ele seja menos um instrumento explícito de opressão de classe. Portanto, o Estado pode, de fato, ser colocado sob a liderança da classe trabalhadora se ela utilizar seu voto e eleger seus próprios partidos. Podemos usar isso para reformar, humanizar e, pode-se dizer, civilizar o capitalismo.
Ninguém negava isso. Kautsky, Luxemburgo e todos os demais concordavam. O verdadeiro ponto de discordância se resumia a: o que fazer quando se está no poder?
Bernstein defendia que os social-democratas poderiam, na verdade, adotar um processo agregativo e incremental, no qual continuariam a acumular reformas. Isso significava passar da humanização e civilização do Estado burguês para a sua completa transcendência.
Melissa Naschek
Exatamente. E às vezes isso é chamado de “socialismo evolucionário”.
Vivek Chibber
Exatamente. A ideia era legislar para chegar ao socialismo. Você continua enfraquecendo o poder do capital, continua usando seus votos, continua legislando para fortalecer o poder do trabalho e, de fato, pode usar o Estado burguês para aprovar leis uma após a outra, o que, em certo ponto, cruzará um limiar onde você não estará mais no capitalismo.
Agora, esta é uma estratégia gradual de longo prazo rumo ao socialismo. E foi aí que os outros membros do partido alemão disseram: “Isso é uma fantasia. Você não pode usar o Estado para transcender o capitalismo. Você terá que ter uma ruptura de algum tipo. Você terá que ter uma ruptura drástica, que virá por meio de uma revolução.”
Assim, o contraste passou a ser entre uma transcendência revolucionária do capitalismo e uma transcendência gradual do capitalismo. Naquela época — é importante notar — todos os partidos no debate se consideravam socialistas e anticapitalistas, no sentido de que todos concordavam com a necessidade de ir além do capitalismo.
Portanto, a visão de justiça e o objetivo eram compartilhados por Bernstein, Luxemburgo, Kautsky — todos eles.
A divergência era simplesmente sobre estratégia: seria realista dizer que podemos usar nosso poder legislativo e nossos votos para enfraquecer gradualmente o capitalismo até que possamos simplesmente derrubá-lo e entrar no socialismo? Ou será necessária uma ruptura brusca, talvez militar, na qual teremos que nos levantar e derrubar o governo, instituindo o socialismo por meio de um ato revolucionário? Essa era a divergência.
Melissa Naschek
Right. And what you’re talking about is known as the reform or revolution debate, after Rosa Luxemburg’s seminal essay, Reform or Revolution?, which was published in 1899. And as you’re saying, Luxemburg was on the side that argued that what was needed was some sort of revolutionary break, and that it was not possible to just come to power in the state and 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?
Vivek Chibber
I think by the 1920s, 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 of 1919 — it is a fact that states in Europe, whether in Western Europe or Eastern Europe, are pretty vulnerable. It is still possible to imagine overthrowing the European ruling class. And the process of state formation is by no means complete.
Embora tenha havido um número enorme de revolucionários verdadeiros na esquerda até a década de 1940, esses revolucionários não foram capazes de provocar revoluções.
When did social democracy start to really diverge from a revolutionary model? And what was the significance of that shift?
Vivek Chibber
I think by the 1920s, 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 of 1919 — it is a fact that states in Europe, whether in Western Europe or Eastern Europe, are pretty vulnerable. It is still possible to imagine overthrowing the European ruling class. And the process of state formation is by no means complete.
Embora tenha havido um número enorme de revolucionários verdadeiros na esquerda até a década de 1940, esses revolucionários não foram capazes de provocar revoluções.
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. And really, I would say, from 1905, which was the first Russian Revolution, all the way into the mid-1930s, when the Spanish Civil War happened, Europe was in some kind of revolutionary process. There were actual openings for revolution. And it was a viable position to hold that the state’s weakness meant there were real openings and possibilities for overthrowing it, and that we should try to build power toward that end.
But even though it continues all the way into the Spanish Civil War, really, between the second failed German revolution and the mid-1920s, it’s starting to become pretty clear to many members of the European left that the possibility of rupture, the possibility of revolution, is receding really fast. And they had to start to deal with the reality that, if they want socialism, or even if they want to change capitalism for the better, it’s going to have to be done through incremental reforms or through some process of legislation and aggregation.
The Objective Conditions
Melissa Naschek
So, what were the main conditions that were causing this change? Because we were just talking about a certain set of conditions in which revolutions seem viable. And I think it’s not just the fact that the revolutions were changing, but that structures were changing as well, which were impacting the possibilities for these revolutionary attempts to succeed.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. I think there are two or three changes that are absolutely key to the fact that revolutions were receding at this time. And I should say, people on the left today still treat it as if there’s just this 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 on the Left in the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, all the way into the 1940s, those revolutionaries were not able to bring about revolutions.
Now you can have two explanations for this. One is that they were all traitors, or they weren’t serious, or they made all sorts of mistakes. But that would be weird because it would mean socialism and Marxism have to be pretty mysterious and baroque institutions and ideologies if nobody understands them. This is the voluntarist explanation, in which everyone failed to be an appropriate Marxist or an appropriate socialist.
Melissa Naschek
Right.
Vivek Chibber
I think a more convincing approach is to say, these people were all very committed — far more committed than anybody on the left in the past two or three generations. They were very, very serious, and they spent untold energy and time trying to bring about revolutionary change, but they were unable to do it. And not because they were insufficiently committed or they weren’t smart enough to do it.
So something happened in the world around them that took revolutions off the table by the 1940s. Now, what was it?
I think two things were really important. One was the achievement of democratic rights across Europe, which made revolution much less necessary for social change than it had been in the 1890s and 1900s. It’s important to remember that the European working class as a whole did not achieve democratic rights until around World War I. Only some segments of it had democratic rights before 1910. There was a kind of qualified franchise that allowed wealthier workers to vote in some countries, but in many others, even that wasn’t allowed.
Melissa Naschek
Right. And we’re also primarily talking about the male vote at that point.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah, exactly. I mean, even working-class men were not allowed to vote right into the twentieth century. So in that situation, if you want to express dissent or force a change, the normal avenues we take for granted in a democracy don’t exist. And so, that pushed the impetus for reform toward revolution.
The lack of access to democratic institutions pushed people toward extra-democratic avenues of change. But once they got democracy, of course, people had other avenues to press for social reforms that were not even possible in an undemocratic situation.
So once you get democracy, people can actually struggle for reforms effectively through institutions and other legal channels, 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 happened was that once the ruling classes made it out of the initial revolutionary opening of 1917–1919, they moved really, really quickly to suppress the labor movement and weaken it, and to a large measure, were successful through two channels. One is, don’t forget, fascism. We get fascism from the early 1920s all the way into the 1930s. And the European fascist movement was directed toward smashing the labor movement, particularly its revolutionary wings. And it was 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 made the task of trying to overthrow capitalism even more unappealing to those who remained. But the flip side of the rise of fascism was the consolidation of the bourgeois state. It was a consolidation of the military, its repressive apparatus, and also its fiscal and monetary apparatus, which enabled it to weather economic crises, including monetary crises. And it’s these crises that had weakened the state in the early part of the twentieth century.
Economic crises preceded all the revolutions in the West. But now, the ability to ride out a crisis — in particular through central banking and fiscal policy — had made the state much more stable. So the Left was handed this situation, where much of the steam for revolutionary change was taken out by the rise of democracy.
On the other hand, the state had been strengthened economically and politically through the development 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.
Uma vez conquistada a democracia, as pessoas podem de fato lutar por reformas de forma eficaz por meio de instituições e outros canais legais.
But even though it continues all the way into the Spanish Civil War, really, between the second failed German revolution and the mid-1920s, it’s starting to become pretty clear to many members of the European left that the possibility of rupture, the possibility of revolution, is receding really fast. And they had to start to deal with the reality that, if they want socialism, or even if they want to change capitalism for the better, it’s going to have to be done through incremental reforms or through some process of legislation and aggregation.
The Objective Conditions
Melissa Naschek
So, what were the main conditions that were causing this change? Because we were just talking about a certain set of conditions in which revolutions seem viable. And I think it’s not just the fact that the revolutions were changing, but that structures were changing as well, which were impacting the possibilities for these revolutionary attempts to succeed.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. I think there are two or three changes that are absolutely key to the fact that revolutions were receding at this time. And I should say, people on the left today still treat it as if there’s just this 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 on the Left in the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, all the way into the 1940s, those revolutionaries were not able to bring about revolutions.
Now you can have two explanations for this. One is that they were all traitors, or they weren’t serious, or they made all sorts of mistakes. But that would be weird because it would mean socialism and Marxism have to be pretty mysterious and baroque institutions and ideologies if nobody understands them. This is the voluntarist explanation, in which everyone failed to be an appropriate Marxist or an appropriate socialist.
Melissa Naschek
Right.
Vivek Chibber
I think a more convincing approach is to say, these people were all very committed — far more committed than anybody on the left in the past two or three generations. They were very, very serious, and they spent untold energy and time trying to bring about revolutionary change, but they were unable to do it. And not because they were insufficiently committed or they weren’t smart enough to do it.
So something happened in the world around them that took revolutions off the table by the 1940s. Now, what was it?
I think two things were really important. One was the achievement of democratic rights across Europe, which made revolution much less necessary for social change than it had been in the 1890s and 1900s. It’s important to remember that the European working class as a whole did not achieve democratic rights until around World War I. Only some segments of it had democratic rights before 1910. There was a kind of qualified franchise that allowed wealthier workers to vote in some countries, but in many others, even that wasn’t allowed.
Melissa Naschek
Right. And we’re also primarily talking about the male vote at that point.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah, exactly. I mean, even working-class men were not allowed to vote right into the twentieth century. So in that situation, if you want to express dissent or force a change, the normal avenues we take for granted in a democracy don’t exist. And so, that pushed the impetus for reform toward revolution.
The lack of access to democratic institutions pushed people toward extra-democratic avenues of change. But once they got democracy, of course, people had other avenues to press for social reforms that were not even possible in an undemocratic situation.
So once you get democracy, people can actually struggle for reforms effectively through institutions and other legal channels, 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 happened was that once the ruling classes made it out of the initial revolutionary opening of 1917–1919, they moved really, really quickly to suppress the labor movement and weaken it, and to a large measure, were successful through two channels. One is, don’t forget, fascism. We get fascism from the early 1920s all the way into the 1930s. And the European fascist movement was directed toward smashing the labor movement, particularly its revolutionary wings. And it was 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 made the task of trying to overthrow capitalism even more unappealing to those who remained. But the flip side of the rise of fascism was the consolidation of the bourgeois state. It was a consolidation of the military, its repressive apparatus, and also its fiscal and monetary apparatus, which enabled it to weather economic crises, including monetary crises. And it’s these crises that had weakened the state in the early part of the twentieth century.
Economic crises preceded all the revolutions in the West. But now, the ability to ride out a crisis — in particular through central banking and fiscal policy — had made the state much more stable. So the Left was handed this situation, where much of the steam for revolutionary change was taken out by the rise of democracy.
On the other hand, the state had been strengthened economically and politically through the development 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.
Uma vez conquistada a democracia, as pessoas podem de fato lutar por reformas de forma eficaz por meio de instituições e outros canais legais.
These were all real changes in capitalism. They made revolution both unlikely and unappealing to many people who had previously been committed to it. So it’s not that you had a kind of reformist takeover or revisionism or something like that, which you sometimes see in the historiography by some of the Left. The reality is that capitalism itself changed, so that the chances for revolution objectively receded.
And by the 1940s and ’50s, you had to be a left that was accommodating to the reality that you’re going to have to find nonrevolutionary ways of moving toward socialism if you still remain committed to it.
Melissa Naschek
Right. And the interesting thing is — going back to our comments about Bismarck and the origins of the welfare state — this version of the state only existed because of previous wins by the Left for expanded democratic rights and access to the state. This wasn’t necessarily the direct intention of advocating for those reforms, but they ended up creating a more stable capitalism. It sounds like that was one of the unintended consequences.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. For instance, look at the German Social Democratic Party’s Erfurt Program, which was fashioned in 1891 as a key founding document of the party when it launched itself as a modern socialist party. That program had two parts to it, and they were published as two parts of a book.
One part said, “We’re going to fight for reforms because it is through fighting for reforms that we win over the working class — we make their lives better, we show that we’re not just ideologues, and that we’re actually interested in their welfare day to day. And so, we’re committed to reforms.” Then the other part said, “We’re going to build on those reforms and use their popularity and our growing power to then push for revolution.”
So the first part was, you might say, kind of the Bernsteinian part, which said, “We are a party that will use every political victory that we experience to improve the material welfare of the working class. We’re going to fight for their material interests.” But then the second part said, “We are not, however, going to be content or limited to improving capitalism. We’re fully committed to having socialism.”
So the early social democrats didn’t see any contradiction between fighting for reforms at that moment and also trying to wage a revolution. There was 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 did every time they humanized capitalism was, in fact, take away some of the impetus toward, and the necessity of, a revolution, because people were making enormous gains.
You have to remember that the people who die in revolutions are mostly workers and peasants. So in today’s left, which is a campus left, there’s a romance of revolution, but they were bloody affairs. And it’s the people who are trying to wage revolution that take it on the chin. So when you look around the world and see that it’s possible to improve your life without revolution, most people are going to say, “Yeah, then let me just try to improve my life without it.”
Melissa Naschek
Yeah. And this reminds me of modern-day accelerationist arguments, such as when people say, “Well, Donald Trump getting elected is great because it’s going to make everything worse, and that means that people are going to be more inclined toward the Left and toward revolutionary arguments.”
I don’t think the social democrats of the nineteenth or twentieth century would have argued for things like that.
Vivek Chibber
Accelerationism has no connection to reality — none whatsoever. It’s tomfoolery on the left, and it shouldn’t be taken seriously at all. It’s just one of the many symptoms of a complete and total lack of connection with everyday people when you see ideologies like this taking root.
The fact of the matter is, when things get 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.
Unfortunately, you would think that it would be people on the left who would be most attuned to the conditions in which revolutions occur or how to bring them about. But there’s a level of fantasy and magical thinking in today’s left that has no connection to reality when it comes to these issues.
The State and Revolution Reform
Melissa Naschek
I want to get back to what you were saying about the state. Did social democrats have a strong theory about the relationship between the state and capitalism, especially since they’re placing so much strategic emphasis on using the state to make changes in capitalism, and also to use those changes as a way to build a working-class socialist movement?
Vivek Chibber
We have to divide the social democratic movement into prewar and postwar. And by war, I mean World War II, not World War I. I think, in the prewar period, that is, the social democratic movement of the first half of the twentieth century, there was a very robust understanding of the bourgeois state and the limits it puts on the chances for progressive change and progressive legislation.
It was not the kind of theory you see written in academic texts today, or since the 1980s and ’90s, when Marxists developed what we call modern state theory. But modern state theory — as developed by people like Nicos Poulantzas, Ralph Miliband, Fred Block, and Claus Offe — really built on the insights or the assertions that early twentieth century social democrats made, assertions which were very sharp and very smart, but weren’t articulated into a full theory.
Os primeiros social-democratas não viam nenhuma contradição entre lutar por reformas naquele momento e também tentar fazer uma revolução.
And by the 1940s and ’50s, you had to be a left that was accommodating to the reality that you’re going to have to find nonrevolutionary ways of moving toward socialism if you still remain committed to it.
Melissa Naschek
Right. And the interesting thing is — going back to our comments about Bismarck and the origins of the welfare state — this version of the state only existed because of previous wins by the Left for expanded democratic rights and access to the state. This wasn’t necessarily the direct intention of advocating for those reforms, but they ended up creating a more stable capitalism. It sounds like that was one of the unintended consequences.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. For instance, look at the German Social Democratic Party’s Erfurt Program, which was fashioned in 1891 as a key founding document of the party when it launched itself as a modern socialist party. That program had two parts to it, and they were published as two parts of a book.
One part said, “We’re going to fight for reforms because it is through fighting for reforms that we win over the working class — we make their lives better, we show that we’re not just ideologues, and that we’re actually interested in their welfare day to day. And so, we’re committed to reforms.” Then the other part said, “We’re going to build on those reforms and use their popularity and our growing power to then push for revolution.”
So the first part was, you might say, kind of the Bernsteinian part, which said, “We are a party that will use every political victory that we experience to improve the material welfare of the working class. We’re going to fight for their material interests.” But then the second part said, “We are not, however, going to be content or limited to improving capitalism. We’re fully committed to having socialism.”
So the early social democrats didn’t see any contradiction between fighting for reforms at that moment and also trying to wage a revolution. There was 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 did every time they humanized capitalism was, in fact, take away some of the impetus toward, and the necessity of, a revolution, because people were making enormous gains.
You have to remember that the people who die in revolutions are mostly workers and peasants. So in today’s left, which is a campus left, there’s a romance of revolution, but they were bloody affairs. And it’s the people who are trying to wage revolution that take it on the chin. So when you look around the world and see that it’s possible to improve your life without revolution, most people are going to say, “Yeah, then let me just try to improve my life without it.”
Melissa Naschek
Yeah. And this reminds me of modern-day accelerationist arguments, such as when people say, “Well, Donald Trump getting elected is great because it’s going to make everything worse, and that means that people are going to be more inclined toward the Left and toward revolutionary arguments.”
I don’t think the social democrats of the nineteenth or twentieth century would have argued for things like that.
Vivek Chibber
Accelerationism has no connection to reality — none whatsoever. It’s tomfoolery on the left, and it shouldn’t be taken seriously at all. It’s just one of the many symptoms of a complete and total lack of connection with everyday people when you see ideologies like this taking root.
The fact of the matter is, when things get 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.
Unfortunately, you would think that it would be people on the left who would be most attuned to the conditions in which revolutions occur or how to bring them about. But there’s a level of fantasy and magical thinking in today’s left that has no connection to reality when it comes to these issues.
The State and Revolution Reform
Melissa Naschek
I want to get back to what you were saying about the state. Did social democrats have a strong theory about the relationship between the state and capitalism, especially since they’re placing so much strategic emphasis on using the state to make changes in capitalism, and also to use those changes as a way to build a working-class socialist movement?
Vivek Chibber
We have to divide the social democratic movement into prewar and postwar. And by war, I mean World War II, not World War I. I think, in the prewar period, that is, the social democratic movement of the first half of the twentieth century, there was a very robust understanding of the bourgeois state and the limits it puts on the chances for progressive change and progressive legislation.
It was not the kind of theory you see written in academic texts today, or since the 1980s and ’90s, when Marxists developed what we call modern state theory. But modern state theory — as developed by people like Nicos Poulantzas, Ralph Miliband, Fred Block, and Claus Offe — really built on the insights or the assertions that early twentieth century social democrats made, assertions which were very sharp and very smart, but weren’t articulated into a full theory.
Os primeiros social-democratas não viam nenhuma contradição entre lutar por reformas naquele momento e também tentar fazer uma revolução.
What the Left did in the latter part of the twentieth century was turn those earlier assertions and affirmations into a theory, making explicit what was implicit.
What was implicit in the early parts of the twentieth century among social democrats was the understanding that the state — even a democratic state, which was in some way beholden to the voters, most of whom were workers — gave greater power to capitalists, even though workers had greater votes. That was essential to their understanding.
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. That book 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. But 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 common understanding of the state was that it is not a naked instrument of class rule because once you got the democratic vote, capitalists couldn’t rely on the state just to be a naked instrument of rule. You had to have a more sophisticated mediation, a more 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.
The more sophisticated perspective essentially said that, even though the state’s class bias can be somewhat mediated or weakened through the vote, it will still remain a class state. Because it’s still a class state, it’s going to take real struggle, real power, and 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 — regardless of whether they were fighting in their own minds for socialism or whether they were fighting in their own minds for merely a form of capitalism — all of them had one thing in common, which was a very, 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 this perspective as well as the later left in the 1970s and ’80s did, but they all knew this. That was the theory that informed their practice. And that theory deepened and grew as their experience with the state grew.
Later on, it got, in many ways, weaker, not better. But in this part of their history — the first half of the twentieth century — they had a pretty robust understanding of the bourgeois state. 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.
Melissa Naschek
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?
Vivek Chibber
I mean, in reality, they didn’t see any choice. 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. 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 the forces of the right-wing parties and mainstream parties.” Or you say, “Alright, revolution is out of the question. We’re going to have to figure out a way of advancing our interests in nonrevolutionary ways.”
Now, if you’re just a college student, or you’re in a little study group, or you meet in your friends’ basements, and you say, “Let’s have revolution,” and then suddenly it occurs to you that we can’t have revolution. You can go about your life . . .
Melissa Naschek
Damn, I feel called out.
Vivek Chibber
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 simple to give it up and say, “Well, we can’t have revolution, 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 they were not in a position to overthrow capitalism, but they also understood that there was a real possibility of making enormous changes within capitalism if they played their 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 and the macroeconomy not only shuts down establishments but also halts 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 and allow 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 still hoped that they could use this to eventually tip over into socialism.
So, you could say that, by the 1940s, you had two wings of social democracy. There was a Bernsteinian wing, which used reforms and sought to use them as a step toward socialism. And then there was a more bourgeois wing that 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.
Social Democracy and Marxism
Melissa Naschek
What was the relationship like between social democracy and Marxism? Were these social democratic parties “Marxist parties”?
Vivek Chibber
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 twentieth 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 as a continuum. There were some parties, like the German Social Democrats and even, really, the Swedes in their first years, that were explicitly Marxist or Marxist-inspired. The Germans, of course — Kautsky, Luxemburg, Bebel, Karl Liebknecht — these were the great Marxists of the first half of the twentieth century. So there’s no doubt that they were Marxist.
But even though the Swedes, historically, are remembered as a very pragmatic party 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 an explicitly socialist party informed by Marxism. So that’s one end of the spectrum.
Well, on the other end of the spectrum, you have the British Labour Party. And in the British Labour Party, key people, like Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, 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 a lineal relationship to Marx himself.
Melissa Naschek
Lafargue was his son-in-law, right?
Vivek Chibber
Yeah, his son-in-law. 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, with very few Marxists.
In Britain, the influence of the Webbs and Fabianism, and of various kinds of non-Marxist socialism, was 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 brought 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 and deeply influenced by them. I would say it’s really only 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 twentieth 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 in 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 saw nationalization as a key goal, even though it didn’t call itself a Marxist party. Every single one of the left-wing social democratic parties saw socialism as a desired end, and they were going to bring socialism about. How? Through class struggle.
All of them were class-struggle parties, and class struggle comes straight out of the Marxist lexicon and strategic perspective. So that whole world, the entire world of the Left, was shaped by Marxism. And the socialism of the early twentieth century was overwhelmingly a socialism with a Marxist inflection — a Marxist cast, which is very different from, say, the 1850s, the 1870s.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw Marx become the strategic saint, you might think, of the Left, whether or not they were Bolsheviks, whether or not they were in the communist movement.
Social Democratic Class Analysis
Melissa Naschek
We talked a bit about the state, but we didn’t really discuss class much, except to mention that the social democratic movements were primarily based in the working class. How did social democrats understand class, the class structure within capitalism, and how did that affect their politics?
Vivek Chibber
Well, I think it evolved over time. In the early years — that is, 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 difference in intensity and pitch, but they all saw politics as 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. The Swedes are a good example where, very early on, the party was creating unions. But in other cases, like England, the trade union movement created the Labour Party.
Melissa Naschek
Would you call it a kind of marriage between the party and the labor movement?
Vivek Chibber
No, really, the party was the creature of the labor movement. In the British case, the unions retained their hegemonic position within the Labour Party all the way into the 1970s and ’80s, using a variety of means. The trade unions initially viewed the Labour Party as an instrument of their own.
The point is that, whether the impetus came from the party or the unions, every social democratic movement 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 didn’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.” This is because across Europe, the working class never accounted for more than 45 percent or 50 percent of the electorate.
So the social democrats 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 — shopkeepers, professionals, and groups 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 became somewhat less appealing. Mind you, right up until the 1960s and ’70s, all the social democratic parties still had their main anchor in the working class. But their vocabulary and their language started changing. It changed from exclusively a class language and a view of themselves as class parties to seeing themselves as parties of the people.
Melissa Naschek
Right. And this is why debates about what class is and who constitutes the working class become so important and have proven so lasting. We talked about this a lot in our PMC episode, you know, just how much ink has been spilled over the question of who counts as a worker. And I think it’s important to emphasize that it’s not an academic terminological debate, but really a debate about who is actually controlling these movements and who these movements are working for.
Vivek Chibber
Absolutely. It’s impossible to overemphasize 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. People like Russell Jacoby 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 is, if you want to see real debates over who is and is not a worker, go back to Mao and to his analysis of the agrarian class structure in pre-1949 China. 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 were they worrying about this? It’s 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” or “I’m a middle class person.” There’s a huge section of the population with what appears to be a mixed life. You have to be able to say, “Well, are these basically workers or are they basically not?”
Melissa Naschek
Right. And I think this goes to one of the fundamental differences between a liberal conception of the electorate and a Marxist conception of the electorate. In the sort of liberal-pluralist view, everybody is just a voter. Everybody represents one vote, and we all get together, and we express our opinions and the majority rules.
But in a Marxist conception — and this is what these social democrats recognized as well — it’s clear that we’re not all equal. We’re all coming from a certain economic position. Unfortunately, that means some people’s opinions are more powerful than others. And that means we have to account for it in our political strategy.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. I would say it’s not just a difference with the liberals. I do believe that a great deal of twentieth-century liberal discourse recognized the existence of class and recognized real differences between people who were economically located differently within the system. But 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 percent or the people or something like that. Yeah.
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 from 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 responded to social democratic parties and programs in the twentieth century was very different to the way, say, manual workers responded to it or blue-collar workers responded to it.
Technically, they’re all part of the 99 percent. But they’ve had very different connections to the social democratic parties and very different demands that they brought 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 constituencies that you would like to have as your anchor, which is workers.
What was implicit in the early parts of the twentieth century among social democrats was the understanding that the state — even a democratic state, which was in some way beholden to the voters, most of whom were workers — gave greater power to capitalists, even though workers had greater votes. That was essential to their understanding.
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. That book 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. But 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 common understanding of the state was that it is not a naked instrument of class rule because once you got the democratic vote, capitalists couldn’t rely on the state just to be a naked instrument of rule. You had to have a more sophisticated mediation, a more 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.
The more sophisticated perspective essentially said that, even though the state’s class bias can be somewhat mediated or weakened through the vote, it will still remain a class state. Because it’s still a class state, it’s going to take real struggle, real power, and 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 — regardless of whether they were fighting in their own minds for socialism or whether they were fighting in their own minds for merely a form of capitalism — all of them had one thing in common, which was a very, 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 this perspective as well as the later left in the 1970s and ’80s did, but they all knew this. That was the theory that informed their practice. And that theory deepened and grew as their experience with the state grew.
Later on, it got, in many ways, weaker, not better. But in this part of their history — the first half of the twentieth century — they had a pretty robust understanding of the bourgeois state. 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.
Melissa Naschek
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?
Vivek Chibber
I mean, in reality, they didn’t see any choice. 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. 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 the forces of the right-wing parties and mainstream parties.” Or you say, “Alright, revolution is out of the question. We’re going to have to figure out a way of advancing our interests in nonrevolutionary ways.”
Now, if you’re just a college student, or you’re in a little study group, or you meet in your friends’ basements, and you say, “Let’s have revolution,” and then suddenly it occurs to you that we can’t have revolution. You can go about your life . . .
Melissa Naschek
Damn, I feel called out.
Vivek Chibber
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 simple to give it up and say, “Well, we can’t have revolution, 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 they were not in a position to overthrow capitalism, but they also understood that there was a real possibility of making enormous changes within capitalism if they played their 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 and the macroeconomy not only shuts down establishments but also halts 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 and allow 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 still hoped that they could use this to eventually tip over into socialism.
So, you could say that, by the 1940s, you had two wings of social democracy. There was a Bernsteinian wing, which used reforms and sought to use them as a step toward socialism. And then there was a more bourgeois wing that 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.
Social Democracy and Marxism
Melissa Naschek
What was the relationship like between social democracy and Marxism? Were these social democratic parties “Marxist parties”?
Vivek Chibber
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 twentieth 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 as a continuum. There were some parties, like the German Social Democrats and even, really, the Swedes in their first years, that were explicitly Marxist or Marxist-inspired. The Germans, of course — Kautsky, Luxemburg, Bebel, Karl Liebknecht — these were the great Marxists of the first half of the twentieth century. So there’s no doubt that they were Marxist.
But even though the Swedes, historically, are remembered as a very pragmatic party 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 an explicitly socialist party informed by Marxism. So that’s one end of the spectrum.
Well, on the other end of the spectrum, you have the British Labour Party. And in the British Labour Party, key people, like Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, 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 a lineal relationship to Marx himself.
Melissa Naschek
Lafargue was his son-in-law, right?
Vivek Chibber
Yeah, his son-in-law. 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, with very few Marxists.
In Britain, the influence of the Webbs and Fabianism, and of various kinds of non-Marxist socialism, was 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 brought 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 and deeply influenced by them. I would say it’s really only 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 twentieth 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 in 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 saw nationalization as a key goal, even though it didn’t call itself a Marxist party. Every single one of the left-wing social democratic parties saw socialism as a desired end, and they were going to bring socialism about. How? Through class struggle.
All of them were class-struggle parties, and class struggle comes straight out of the Marxist lexicon and strategic perspective. So that whole world, the entire world of the Left, was shaped by Marxism. And the socialism of the early twentieth century was overwhelmingly a socialism with a Marxist inflection — a Marxist cast, which is very different from, say, the 1850s, the 1870s.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw Marx become the strategic saint, you might think, of the Left, whether or not they were Bolsheviks, whether or not they were in the communist movement.
Social Democratic Class Analysis
Melissa Naschek
We talked a bit about the state, but we didn’t really discuss class much, except to mention that the social democratic movements were primarily based in the working class. How did social democrats understand class, the class structure within capitalism, and how did that affect their politics?
Vivek Chibber
Well, I think it evolved over time. In the early years — that is, 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 difference in intensity and pitch, but they all saw politics as 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. The Swedes are a good example where, very early on, the party was creating unions. But in other cases, like England, the trade union movement created the Labour Party.
Melissa Naschek
Would you call it a kind of marriage between the party and the labor movement?
Vivek Chibber
No, really, the party was the creature of the labor movement. In the British case, the unions retained their hegemonic position within the Labour Party all the way into the 1970s and ’80s, using a variety of means. The trade unions initially viewed the Labour Party as an instrument of their own.
The point is that, whether the impetus came from the party or the unions, every social democratic movement 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 didn’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.” This is because across Europe, the working class never accounted for more than 45 percent or 50 percent of the electorate.
So the social democrats 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 — shopkeepers, professionals, and groups 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 became somewhat less appealing. Mind you, right up until the 1960s and ’70s, all the social democratic parties still had their main anchor in the working class. But their vocabulary and their language started changing. It changed from exclusively a class language and a view of themselves as class parties to seeing themselves as parties of the people.
Melissa Naschek
Right. And this is why debates about what class is and who constitutes the working class become so important and have proven so lasting. We talked about this a lot in our PMC episode, you know, just how much ink has been spilled over the question of who counts as a worker. And I think it’s important to emphasize that it’s not an academic terminological debate, but really a debate about who is actually controlling these movements and who these movements are working for.
Vivek Chibber
Absolutely. It’s impossible to overemphasize 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. People like Russell Jacoby 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 is, if you want to see real debates over who is and is not a worker, go back to Mao and to his analysis of the agrarian class structure in pre-1949 China. 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 were they worrying about this? It’s 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” or “I’m a middle class person.” There’s a huge section of the population with what appears to be a mixed life. You have to be able to say, “Well, are these basically workers or are they basically not?”
Melissa Naschek
Right. And I think this goes to one of the fundamental differences between a liberal conception of the electorate and a Marxist conception of the electorate. In the sort of liberal-pluralist view, everybody is just a voter. Everybody represents one vote, and we all get together, and we express our opinions and the majority rules.
But in a Marxist conception — and this is what these social democrats recognized as well — it’s clear that we’re not all equal. We’re all coming from a certain economic position. Unfortunately, that means some people’s opinions are more powerful than others. And that means we have to account for it in our political strategy.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. I would say it’s not just a difference with the liberals. I do believe that a great deal of twentieth-century liberal discourse recognized the existence of class and recognized real differences between people who were economically located differently within the system. But 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 percent or the people or something like that. Yeah.
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 from 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 responded to social democratic parties and programs in the twentieth century was very different to the way, say, manual workers responded to it or blue-collar workers responded to it.
Technically, they’re all part of the 99 percent. But they’ve had very different connections to the social democratic parties and very different demands that they brought 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 constituencies that you would like to have as your anchor, which is workers.
Uma esquerda neoliberal
Melissa Naschek
Analisando a esquerda atual — e vamos falar especificamente da esquerda americana — você acha que ela é uma esquerda social-democrata?
Vivek Chibber
Não, eu diria que é uma minoria. Uma minoria da esquerda é social-democrata. A maior parte da esquerda americana é o que eu chamo de esquerda neoliberal.
Então, se definirmos uma esquerda social-democrata da maneira que fiz anteriormente neste episódio, que é uma esquerda que busca reformar e humanizar o capitalismo, mas entende que a reforma virá por meio do enfrentamento dos verdadeiros centros de poder, do enfrentamento do capital, e entende que isso exigirá unir os trabalhadores nas mesmas organizações e lutar ao lado deles contra esses centros de poder, ainda assim é uma minoria bastante pequena.
A maior parte da esquerda nos Estados Unidos ainda vê o combate à discriminação e o multiculturalismo como seu horizonte, o que, quero dizer, todo neoliberal no mundo deseja ver um capitalismo menos discriminatório. Todo libertário deseja ver mercados de trabalho que recompensem as pessoas pelo talento e não pela raça ou gênero. Todo libertário adoraria ver uma classe dominante verdadeiramente multicultural, uma elite política verdadeiramente multigênero.
Essas são todas demandas progressistas, mas são progressistas dentro do pior tipo de capitalismo que vimos nos últimos 120 anos. Então, sim, são coisas boas de se ter, mas a ideia de que isso tenha qualquer conexão com a social-democracia como fenômeno histórico é simplesmente ridícula. Não acho que haja qualquer conexão.
Mas, como já disse antes, acho que estamos em um processo de aprendizado, de redescoberta de algumas dessas raízes, de tentativa de recapturar sua energia e seu poder, e de tentativa de elaborar uma política em torno delas. Isso só acontecerá se essa esquerda neoliberal, a esquerda identitária e interseccional, for em algum momento num futuro próximo substituída por algo como uma esquerda da luta de classes, uma esquerda comprometida com os interesses materiais dos trabalhadores e que não rejeite a própria ideia de análise material e interesse material. Ainda estamos tendo esses debates, o que significa, a meu ver, que nem sequer estamos no início de uma esquerda verdadeiramente eficaz para a classe trabalhadora.
Colaboradores
Vivek Chibber é professor de sociologia na Universidade de Nova York. Ele é editor da revista Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.
Melissa Naschek é membro dos Socialistas Democráticos da América.
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