Social democracy
Social democracy is a capitalist tendency and variant of liberalism which which seeks the preservation of private ownership and the capitalist system through gradual, momentary socioeconomic reforms directed at improving living and labor conditions for the working class. Social democracy serves a counter-revolutionary role in that it divides working class movements, stagnates their methods of struggle and goals to mere electorialism and reforms in the framework of the bourgeois system, and propagates opposition towards revolution and communism. Social democracy has often been a core element in the rise of fascist movements, both being mechanisms to maintain capitalism in times of crisis and socialist revolution.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ R. P. Dutt (1935). Fascism and Social Revolution, Ch. VIII, Social Democracy and Fascism. Available on the Marxists Internet Archive.
"[...] if the Fascist dictatorship weakens, Social Democracy stands ready to come to the rescue of capitalism. The distinction of Social Democracy and Fascism is no less important to understand than the parallelism. Both are instruments of the rule of monopoly capital. Both fight the working-class revolution. Both weaken and disrupt the class organisations of the workers. But their methods differ. Fascism shatters the class organisations of the workers from without, opposing their whole basis, and putting forward an alternative “national” ideology. Social Democracy undermines the class organisations of the workers from within, building on the basis of the previous independent movement and “Marxist” ideology, which still holds the workers’ traditions and discipline, in order more effectively to carry through the policy of capital and smash all militant struggle. Fascism accordingly requires for its full realisation the “totalitarian” terroristic class-State. Social Democracy controls the workers most favourably and successfully in the liberal- parliamentary class-State, utilising its own “internal” methods of discipline, and occasional State coercion, for the suppression of all militant struggle. Fascism operates primarily by coercion alongside of deception. Social Democracy operates primarily by deception, alongside of coercion."