Socialist Parties

Socialist and social-democratic parties are the main and the most electorally successful party family of the Left. The first socialist parties appeared in Europe during the last quarter of the 19th century as a result of the politicization of the class conflicts generated by the Industrial Revolution. The formation of socialist parties was one of the outcomes of the cleavage between capital and labor and of the political mobilization of the working class. This entry discusses the origins, programs, and political role of these parties.

Prior to World War I, there were socialist or social-democratic parties or candidates in almost every European country and in some states in other regions of the world (Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and some Latin American countries). In some cases, they were part of a subculture milieu in which a socialist mass-party organization was linked to a trade union and to a network of ancillary groups. In its early years, the European socialist or social-democratic parties emphasized some core ideas concerning the transformation of capitalist societies into more egalitarian ones built on solidarity, cooperation, and social justice. These parties, many of them Marxist, postulated the end of human exploitation, class divisions, and economic inequalities. The 1940s witnessed the expansion of socialist parties to places distant from their European origins, as some anticolonial organizations adopted socialism as their ideology in Asia and Africa. However, this phenomenon resulted in the formation of parties that—from the ideological point of view—could only partially be considered socialist given their combination of a socialist ideology with anticolonial and nationalist ideas.

The socialist movement experienced, almost since its birth, divisions over its program and policies for the transformation of capitalism (e.g., concerning the role of the state in the management of the economy) and over the best strategies to achieve it (e.g., divisions between reformists and revolutionaries). These debates among parties and leaders were already present in the First (1864) and Second (1889) International Working Men's Associations. In his analysis of electoral socialism, Adam Przeworski argues that the early socialists confronted three choices: (1) whether to achieve socialist goals from within or from outside the political institutions of capitalism, (2) whether to trust exclusively in the working class as the agent of socialist change or whether to appeal to other social classes as well, and (3) whether to transform society through partial reforms or to devote all efforts to the final abolition of capitalism. The responses to these three choices caused internal strife, shaped the evolution of the socialist parties, and contributed to differentiate them from other left-wing organizations.

The socialists decided to participate in elections. In doing so, socialist parties tried to take advantage of the political rights that capitalist societies accorded to the workers as a means to achieve improvements in their life conditions. This option clearly differentiated socialist parties from “abstentionist” streams [Page 2455]of the workers' movement, such as the anarchists. Despite the acceptance of the electoral process to win political power, within the socialist parties, there was a certain ambivalence about the need to eventually use revolutionary means to conquer political power or to defend it once attained by peaceful means. However, democracy eventually became not just the main path to socialism but the parties' very goal. In a certain sense, the ideal defended by socialist parties consisted in the extension of democratic political principles to the economic and social domains. The abandonment of revolutionary roads to gain power differentiated socialist and social-democratic parties from other groups of socialist and Marxist origin, such as the Communists.

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