Spineless, unprincipled, constantly making excuses about why they’re not doing anything, unwilling to do literally fucking ANYTHING to help the people they say they represent.
What are the underlying material conditions driving this?
Here in BC, Canada, the “social democratic” NDP government recently got a majority government, which means they can do literally anything they want. Pass any legislation they want. Pass any laws, any taxes, literally whatever the fuck they want.
And what have they done? FUCK ALL. Nothing. Not a single piece of legislation that I can think of. They’re taking as long as they possibly can to implement $15 minimum wage, no paid sick days, no card check legislation, fucking NOTHING. Instead of using the pandemic as the obvious reason to pass this legislation they are hiding behind it as their excuse to avoid doing literally anything useful.
This seems to be the case all over the Western world.
WHY?
The collapse of the Soviet Union allowed them to go back to what they always were inside.
Because despite what social Democrats believe, capitalism can’t be made humane. They are ultimately subjugated to capital’s will sooner or later
Well sure, but the BC NDP government of the 1970’s passed on average one piece of legislation every three days. The BC NDP of today can’t be bothered to put a single fucking bill up for a vote. What has changed? Obviously the labour movement is a lot weaker now, but what else?
This is it. The answer. Social Democratic gains in the last century cannot be replicated in this one because we’re missing both the Soviet Union and the feeling among the bourgeoisie of that era. They were living in a time where many of them had witnessed with terror the birth of the Soviet Union, the explosion of trade union movements throughout the industrialized world, demands for safety and conditions that were swiftly met. The capitalists were on guard, on the back foot, this communism thing was new and scary, they hadn’t figured out how to deal with it yet so they made deals with the workers, appeasement. Also the world after the second world war was for the US and Europe a lot different. A lot of value had been destroyed in the war, there was massive room for growth and high profits, so it mattered less. They’ve since squeezed out all that growth and are now desperately cutting at things to get more growth because you have to have growth for capitalism. Unless an alien salesperson comes along, sells the capitalists a wormhole to a new world of resources and intelligent beings that can be easily subjugated by our militaries to give them another frontier for expansion and money to bribe the folks at home you’re not going to see a return to that. Maybe if there was some massive die-off of humanity as a result of a very deadly plague or nuclear or conventional war that destroyed enough capital it might be able to restart the cycle a bit but none of these things are super likely.
Even if we did experience similar conditions for growth I doubt they’d be as willing to share. They have better tools, a century of experience and refinement for controlling the proles and are cocky because they consider themselves to have won the war against communism with the collapse of the USSR. To say nothing of the mass rejection of Marxism in the west thanks to propaganda which further puts them at ease. They can ignore social democrats/dem-socs all day in the imperial core.
Well its a mixed bag. Certainly, there is a supplantation of mass democracy. Politicians largely abandoned the idea of actually changing the world in the 1990s and turned over their authority to non-majoritarian institutions, like finance, the EU and IMF. There is a belief, I think, stemming from fear of radical movements of the 1960s mixed with the crises of the 1970s and 1980s that convinced politicians that the world was too interconnected and complicated to be managed through party platforms and elections every 4 years or so.
At the same time, there is a paralysis, because even when radicals rise to power, they realize that they actually have little power to change anything anyway, due to the dissolution of organized labor and mass political participation.
A lot that’s wrong with Social-Democratic Parties is found in this Bernstein quote
The Final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything.
From a point of view where the only thing that matters is for your party to win elections, it becomes easy to justify abandoning any platform which makes it hard to do so (ie: policies those that are in direct opposition to the Bourgeois) and clearly the BCNDP cares more for keeping their majority then with doing anything with it.
Bill Clinton and one of his advisors had a conversation about this when they were down in polls before the reelection, and decided to break with the succdem-ish politics.
“What’s the point of getting reelected if you have no mandate to do anything when you’re reelected?”
Bill: “What’s the point of having a mandate if you can’t get reelected? Isn’t the ultimate goal getting reelected?”
All the European socdem parties trace their lineage to the opportunist right wing of the 2nd International, the side that chose social chauvinism over international solidarity in 1914 and proved Lenin right repeatedly by doubling and then tripling down on this betrayal of the working class.
Lenin has an edgy screed on it at the time, as ever https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x02.htm But unless you have knowledge of the (mostly forgotten) key players in Socialism at the time it won’t make a lot of sense.
Jacobin, surprisingly, has an ok review https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/second-international-bernstein-rosa-luxemburg-unions-world-war
Also Lenin shits on contemporary succdems a lot for the same reasons in State and Revolution, though you may have already read that since pretty much every tendency on this site tells you to read it.
If you haven’t…set aside some time to read it, slowly and carefully. Take notes. :lenin-shining:
What everyone else said and also the threat of the Soviet Union isn’t at their backs.
