Asoka89
3rd June 2009, 07:38
I’m posting this essay in response to some of the comments from Bhaskar’s “Beyond Good and Evil” post. First, I will fess up and say that my arguments are largely derived from the book Revolutionary Strategy by the British Marxist and academic lawyer Mike McNair. I don’t claim to be offering anything particularly original here. Furthermore, what I write may not seem to have direct relevance for socialists in the U.S., where we lack even a labor party run by right-wing “Third Way” neoliberals. But since the hundred-plus year old debate in the original Social Democratic Party of Germany — between the “revisionist” Eduard Bernstein, the “centrist” Karl Kautsky, and the “left radical” Rosa Luxemburg — came up in discussion, I thought I’d weigh in.
The dominant tendency on the Left for the last century has its roots in the right wing of the socialist movement, of which Eduard Bernstein was the official theoretician. This tendency, as Bernstein suggested, has participated in cross-class coalition “left” governments as a means of achieving reform. However, the parties of official Social Democracy are largely now as committed to free market dogmas as the parties of the Right. They are not so much “social democratic” as “social liberal.” It makes no sense to think of the UK’s Tony Blair, Germany’s Gerhard Schröeder, Italy’s Romano Prodi or or France’s Laurent Fabius as social democrats.To the left of the social liberals are parties, often with roots in the old official Communist movement, which are either “real,” Cold War-era style social democrats (like Die Linke, in Germany) or which claim to be anti-capitalist and want more than reform (like Rifondazione Comunista in Italy).
Such parties are confronted with a rather old question whenever they become sizable: should they participate in coalition governments controlled by social-liberals – people with “Third Way” politics – in order to keep out the open parties of the Right?
By and large – perhaps out of the desire to bring marginal advantages to the exploited and oppressed — this is what they have done. They have been sucked into the role of junior partners to the social-liberals in administering the capitalist regime, and thereby undermined their claim to offer an alternative to the neoliberal consensus. The Brazilian Workers Party was originally a radical, “social movement” party; it is now a social-liberal party of coalition government, participating as a minority. Rifondazione joined Prodi’s Unione coalition government, with disastrous results. Die Linke is in a social-liberal regional government in Berlin. And we are seeing the same thing happen again in Iceland, with the Left Greens joining with the social-liberal Social Democratic Alliance in government as a minority partner.
[...]
http://theactivist.org/blog/the-current-relevance-of-an-old-debate#comments
Very good post in the blog of the youth branch of the pretty moderate DSA. Very interesting thoughts, its interesting to see some of CPGB's ideology spill over across the pond into a much bigger group (10k+ members)
The dominant tendency on the Left for the last century has its roots in the right wing of the socialist movement, of which Eduard Bernstein was the official theoretician. This tendency, as Bernstein suggested, has participated in cross-class coalition “left” governments as a means of achieving reform. However, the parties of official Social Democracy are largely now as committed to free market dogmas as the parties of the Right. They are not so much “social democratic” as “social liberal.” It makes no sense to think of the UK’s Tony Blair, Germany’s Gerhard Schröeder, Italy’s Romano Prodi or or France’s Laurent Fabius as social democrats.To the left of the social liberals are parties, often with roots in the old official Communist movement, which are either “real,” Cold War-era style social democrats (like Die Linke, in Germany) or which claim to be anti-capitalist and want more than reform (like Rifondazione Comunista in Italy).
Such parties are confronted with a rather old question whenever they become sizable: should they participate in coalition governments controlled by social-liberals – people with “Third Way” politics – in order to keep out the open parties of the Right?
By and large – perhaps out of the desire to bring marginal advantages to the exploited and oppressed — this is what they have done. They have been sucked into the role of junior partners to the social-liberals in administering the capitalist regime, and thereby undermined their claim to offer an alternative to the neoliberal consensus. The Brazilian Workers Party was originally a radical, “social movement” party; it is now a social-liberal party of coalition government, participating as a minority. Rifondazione joined Prodi’s Unione coalition government, with disastrous results. Die Linke is in a social-liberal regional government in Berlin. And we are seeing the same thing happen again in Iceland, with the Left Greens joining with the social-liberal Social Democratic Alliance in government as a minority partner.
[...]
http://theactivist.org/blog/the-current-relevance-of-an-old-debate#comments
Very good post in the blog of the youth branch of the pretty moderate DSA. Very interesting thoughts, its interesting to see some of CPGB's ideology spill over across the pond into a much bigger group (10k+ members)