A Brief History of Social Democracy. And Why We Need to Go Even Further (Stay At Home #53)

[@lasseade]

1:05: 20 The bread riots in Sweden 1917 made the Social Democratic leader Hjalmar Branting rush out to take the lead. He then turned the fear of the violent socialistic revolutions in Russia and Finland in to excellent arguments for equal voting rights. Because of this we got those rights 1921. This in turn gave the swedish worker moment a lot more leverage. The reformists need the radicals and the other way around. And the swedish worker moment surely benefited from the revolutions in the east.

[@guydrake8606]

Would like a video discussing Communist parties impact on the labor movement and electoral elections.

[@peaceizaverb2582]

FANTASTIC! Really want to hear more fro m Birch!

[@MLTHRON7542]

Mr. Sunkara had an agenda, a way he wanted the interview to go. This could/should have been a dialogue of discovery. His questions were good, his statements were not. Prof. Birch's presentation of the history of social democracy was excellent, but I think there needed to be a dialog on why social democracy was attenuated in the Scandinavian countries and why is it seems impossible in the US today,

[@patrickholt2270]

The French Popular Front government was taken down by capital flight and capital strike, which prevented their Keynesian style policies of increasing pay and jobs from reviving the economy as it did in Sweden and the USA, and made them just result in inflation instead. Mitterand, and even more Hollande, were up against the same capital flight and capital strike, except that being in the EU at that point vastly facilitated that capital flight, and Hollande, also being in the Euro currency by then, was denied all means of controlling capital movement and ameliorating long term chronic trade deficits vis a vis Germany by devaluation of the Franc, state aid and direct government investment in French industry, preferential and non-privatised state purchasing etc. The American situation is different, because you still have a sovereign currency, as well as being your own giant single market, but the obstacle for social democracy or democratic socialism isn't just internal barriers in terms of class power, but also the capitalist class power structurally built into trade treaties and insternational structures such as the WTO, and the EU. And of course you always have to have stern vigilence against careerism and opportunism from pmc cadres and representatives pursuing the apparent path of least resistance and in the process demoralising and demobilizing working class organisation and consciousness.

[@patrickholt2270]

Another thing I was recently thinking about is that "the commanding heights" strategy was both never implemented, and thus not politically feasible, nor coherent in terms of class power. As I understand it the left social democrat or democratic socialist objective of nationalizing "the commanding heights of the economy", as I think Aneirin Bevan coined it, was about establishing levers of national economic control and planning. So it was a strategy in terms of economic management, not securing commanding class power for the working class. Well without the class power, all the rest is impossible and insecure anyway. So it seems to me that phrase is poorly considered, especially when there seems to have been little thought about what the commanding heights of the modern economy are. Surely it cannot be the same old list of heavy industries, railways and mining, which scarcely exist in our de-industrialised countries, even if state management and planning was a sufficient goal in itself, which it isn't, or the meaning of socialism, which it isn't either.

[@ashkanjahangiri1238]

Who can link me the video that was supposed to play at the 45 minute mark? Please share the video to build solidarity with me, a working class person.

[@tanbir-ul-israq9577]

Please do something to make the audio quality sharp and clean.

[@nathanscottshoemaker2554]

Federal initiative spending is social and economic developmental leveraging potent, reserve and private lending is personal/private deficit. The federal government doesn't have to fawn to investment as it is the first source of reserve lending as well as congressional statute initiative spending. Fed gov. buys into circulation labor and product initiating the perpetuation of exchange. MMT is the cap stone to power public development.

[@jamescreegan4232]

There is much that is informative--but also much to criticize--about this podcast. I learned quite a bit about Sweden and Denmark. But I want to concentrate on the criticisms. Birch's capsule history of Social Democracy elides over the role of most Second International Parties in mobilizing support for WWI, and especially that of the German SPD government in suppressing the Spartacus Rising in 1918-19 (which included the deployment of proto-Nazi military bands--the Freikorps--against the revolution.) Why did a self-proclaimed socialist party of the working class play the role of defender of capitalism in extremis? And why have they continued to play such a role in more recent times, e.g. the intervention of leading socialist Mario Soares in the Portuguese crisis of 1973-74? Sunkara and Birch summarily dismiss the existence of the USSR as a factor in the rise of the welfare state in Western capitalist countries. But why, then, were the German Social Democracy and the British Labour Party accorded the grudging status of legitimate political players, while the Italian and French Communist Parties were frozen out of political power? Might not this have had something to do with the SDs' declarations of fealty to "democracy", as opposed to "Communist totalitarianism"? The Soviet Union was certainly no model of socialism for anyone committed to workers' democracy, but the fact that it was a major world power organized along non-capitalist lines conditioned not only the foreign relations, but also the internal politics, of capitalist states. Sunkara and Birch don't seem to draw any lessons from the Mitterrand experience concerning the limits of incrementalism. Mitterrand's nationalizations and radical welfare state measures met with a swift and decisive response from French capital in the form of an attack on the franc and capital flight. Resisting the capitalist offensive would have required going beyond the limits of bourgeois legality. (Mitterrand himself recognized this when he said that the failure of his reform efforts meant that one had to be a Leninist to move toward socialism at all). But why did Mitterrand not only fail to resist the capitalist offensive successfully, but turn around to become the implementer of austerity? Why did Syriza in Greece do the same thing? Sunkara and Birch seem to regard the path to socialism as a series of social democratic reforms that go even further. But history seems to prove that "going further" involves not more extensive reform measures, but an extra-parliamentary class confrontation. Social democratic parties, with their commitment to "democratic" legality, are defined precisely by their unwillingness to contemplate, let alone prepare for, such an eventuality, even at their militant reformist best. It is this reverence for bourgeois legality, and willingness to act as the existing order's guardians of last resort, that accorded social democracy a certain legitimacy in Western democracies, even though they may have fought for, and even won, reforms that are beneficial to workers and distasteful to capital. The outer limits of such efforts depend upon how much the ruling class is willing to tolerate, which in today's globalized capitalism is much less than in the 50s 60s.

[@SubhashYadav-eo9nc]

I agree. A social democratic strategy towards communism is doomed to fail. They're basically handing the capitalists all the power. If capitalists are allowed to have a veto everytime they "negotiate" terms with labour, (which is what Birch advocates for; worrying about disinvestment and recessions if radical measures are taken), why wouldn't they use it to hold on to their power, crashing the economy whenever they feel threatened. Even in this paradigm, the only reason capitalists wouldn't tank the economy to screw over workers every time is if they fear a backlash, an extralegal backlash, which is only bolstered by the existence of an anti-capitalist superpower. I have no idea why Birch and Sunkara minimize the role of the U.S.S.R. in these class "negotiations". Sunkara basically asks a rhetorical question, as if it were obvious to reasonable people that the U.S.S.R. played no positive role in the proliferation of these social democratic parties in Europe. In fact, these folks assert that the existence of the Soviet Union was detrimental to the labour movements in these European countries; painfully oblivious to the fact that, as you asserted, it was their "reverence for bourgeois legality" that made these social democratic parties seem viable to the capitalist class, who knew well that the alternative, Communists, held no such delusions. That french man can blabber on about how upholders of capitalism have no place in his social democratic party, everybody knows how the game is played. I am also annoyed by Birch's assertion that the foundation of colonialism didn't rest on resource extraction; that, the reason imperial powers held on their colonies wasn't primarily economic. He seems to think that these colonists were committing economic-suicide by holding on to their empires. This, of course, doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to make universal gains; re-establishing the commons, decommodifying basic utilities. Seeking reforms and making revolution need not be at odds with one another, as long as we agree that, in the end, a revolution is imperative. It need not be a bloody one, I hope it isn't, but this seems unlikely. We seek reforms to make revolution. Hell, even the Maoists in my country, engaged in a decades long armed struggle, have begun taking the political wing of their movement [the Communist Part of India (Maoist)] seriously, winning local seats in recent elections.

[@BigBennKlingon]

Great points. Not only was bourgeois legality a fatal self-imposed restriction on social dem parties and politicians. But it was also the primary means of demobilizing the working class when social dems gained any sort of power or influence. Class conflict was moved from the streets and shop floors to the courts. Mass mobilizations was replaced with lawyers. The working class was stripped of it's only true weapon and was made docile. This in turn paved the way for the inevitable neoliberal reversal of reforms. Also it's very hard to take seriously any analysis of social democracy that glosses over 1914 and 1918.

[@lasseade]

50:04: this is how many of us are stuck in the neoclassical austerity mindset concerning economics Everybody should get at least a minor grip on MMT. Not the polices but the theoretical framework. Watch Stephanie Kelton etc. Otherwise, great lecture!

[@msg5352]

Almost 10 minutes into Birch's presentation and I still haven't heard a clear definition of "social democracy" vs "socialism" or anything else. This is pitched for people who already bring a lot of historical knowledge, much is assumed.

[@feelingveryattackedrn5750]

These ideas generally speaking do not have clearly fleshed out definitions though, especially across history. I would say that in modern times the working definitions are as follows: A social democracy is when a government democratically assigns a (relatively) large percentage of the profits from the private sector to social programs. Social democracies have market economies/capitalist economies. Socialism, on the other hand, is when the workers "control the means of production". This means that there is no private sector; all businesses participate in the governments plan of resource distribution and there is no "profit" extracted from labor, only the outputs of the labor. In a socialist state, as opposed to a social democratic state, the government works hand in hand with businesses, rather than simply agreeing to a policy of taxation and letting them operate independently. I hope that this is a good enough working definition. Because people like Marx and Engels did not put forth clear delineations between terms like "socialism" and "communism", and because they did not mark a path for what societies embracing these ought to look like, it has been left to leftist parties across history to define them in real world terms. Lenin had his idea of what socialism/communism is, Mao had his idea of what socialism/communism is, Chavez had his... and so on. This is why Bernie can say things like "we want democratic socialism that looks like Denmark" while the PM of Denmark will rebuke that and say "we arent socialist", and neither are really right or wrong.

[@feelingveryattackedrn5750]

As an addendum, social democracy in this talk refers to (also) the political movement that spread across parts of Europe in this time where social democrat, socialist, and communist parties began to take power. So each place and each party had their own goals and outcomes and they were all broadly part of the push towards social democracy in these places.

[@sanwalyousaf]

Socialism doesn't have a definition. It's an aspiration

[@feelingveryattackedrn5750]

@@sanwalyousaf I dont think thats a helpful way to answer. If youre aspiring to something, you still have to be able to define that.

[@JoaoSantos-lv4rc]

22:25

[@kayedal-haddad]

What's the difference between a Social Democrat and a Liberal?

[@Ggaia-d9z]

None

[@lilgarbagedisposal9141]

This guy should start an organization called the Jonah Birch Society

[@JoaoSantos-lv4rc]

ooh was the 2d vid too long?

[@DougGrinbergs]

Crummy audio #BadAudioPandemic Bye.

[@tanbir-ul-israq9577]

I second you. It's a form torture to my ears

[@karfar8029]

The fatal flaw in his arguement is that we have a sovereign free floating fiat currency. He says that we need revenue before we can spend federally. The fact is that all congressional appropriations of funds are created by fiat in our current system. Taxes, at the federal level, are not a funding mechanism for federal spending. His lack of understanding the monetary system can only harm what it is he is pushing for.

[@patrickholt2270]

You still need to have a production policy. One of the all-the-things neoliberal economics gets wrong is in assuming you can have infinite financialisation and run society and have economic growth while completely de-industrializing and not making anything. Real growth is production, because production adds new value into the economy through both the creation and distribution of commodities and through the incomes paid to workers to make those commodities, which creates the demand which enables businesses to exist. Without production, new money on its own, whether created responsibility by government for spending on public services or irresponsibly by banks and lenders for speculating on property and looting existing enterprises and public services, won't stay in the economy but will flow out to other countries where commodites are made which Americans consume. Merchant and finance capital move capital around geographically, but they don't add new capital, which requires production, a la the bourgeois mode of production. Without new production, profits are only coming from depleting previous resources, both the looting of public assets, and the depletion of nature and fossil fuels. Looting public assets results in inability to fight pandemics, of which more are coming, and the depletion of nature and fossil fuels results in mass extinction and an unsurvivable planet. So reviving production, paradoxically, is essential for making the economy sustainable.

[@cyber-commie4447]

For a healthy economy, use value = value in circulation. An economy that is not based on the production of goods and services that have use value, is a failed economy.Such an economy has disconnected itself from the real needs of the masses and has become a vacant symbol. This is exemplified by the current disconnect of the stock market and financial market from the actual conditions of employment in the US. The neoliberal ideology is an ideology meant to enforce Capitalist class power.

[@SubhashYadav-eo9nc]

@@cyber-commie4447 Yessir. So, instead of merely focusing on increasing production, we need to assert greater control (democratic control; though it's truly democratic only when the workers effectively seize the means of production) on the production-process; determining what stuff gets produced, and, how stuff gets produced. This might well mean shrinking overall production, reducing strain on our natural resources and minimizing wastage. You're right to say that "use-value" should determine production priorities.