Social Democracy

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IS THE name of an international political movement that advocates a strong, stable, and just democratic society, to be achieved by regulation and management of the capitalist economy. Social democracy is a variant of socialism, and as such the ideas behind it can be traced back to 18th-century Enlightenment critiques of private property, the early 19th-century models of reform capitalism (for example, Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, P.J. Proudhon, Henri St. Simon), and the monumental critique of modern capitalism formulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

With the rise of an industrial proletariat in the second half of the 19th century, and especially after the failed social revolutions of 1848, workers’ movements arose in many western European cities to fight for the right to organize and vote for improved working conditions and for health, disability, and other kinds of insurance. Social democracy was thus born with the idea of improving the lot of the working classes and evolved into a larger political vision of a more humane, just society.

In 1864 Karl Marx, along with the Italian revolutionary Joseph Mazzini and the secretary of the English Carpenter's Union, Robert Applegarth, founded in London the International Working Men's Association, commonly called the First International. This moment marked the beginning of the struggle for a socialist version of modern democracy. At about the same time in Germany the charismatic Jewish lawyer, thinker, and activist Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64) fought for the workers’ rights to organize, vote, and form their own productive associations. He founded the General German Workers’ Association in 1863, a year before he died in a duel. At the time, the association represented only a small number of the workers who had emigrated from rural areas into the new industrial cities.

In 1875, Lassalle's group merged with a rival association, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (ADAV), to form the German Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP). From 1878 to 1890 the party was suppressed and laws were passed to prohibit members of the party from organizing public demonstrations or circulating party literature. These antisocialist laws, promulgated by Otto von Bismarck and enforced by Germany's secret police, had the effect of giving the organization a coherence and militant purpose it might not otherwise have enjoyed. Bismarck also tried to co-opt the workers by introducing progressive social legislation of his own, which had the effect of giving the workers a stake in the capitalist system but also anchoring the idea of protection of workers’ rights in state law. After the antisocialist laws were relaxed in 1890, the SAP changed its name to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which still exists today.

In 1891 the Social Democrats promoted a platform at their party congress in Erfurt that called for the overthrow of the capitalist system of private property, but at the same time demanded a long list of reforms that would improve the lives of the workers within bourgeois society. This compromise platform satisfied the theoretical purists who did not want to abandon the ideas of Marx and other socialist thinkers who had predicted the imminent demise of capitalism, but also appealed to the rank and file of workers who saw their living standards rise from year to year and were happy to fight for a bigger piece of the capitalist pie.

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