Why not social democracy?

[Idealism]

My question is the one put forwards by my friend, and I'm having trouble arguing against him.

He essentially says this. Capitalism has positives and negatives, the negatives are necessary to maintain the positives which uphold a productive society.

Positives:
incentive for hard work and innovation.
overall standard of living increases with the generated wealth
Negatives:
Unequal distribution of wealth,
oppression of workers.

So as he sees it, social democracy minimizes the harms and still keeps the positives. How do I argue against that from a Marxist perspective.

[Zanthorus]

So as he sees it, social democracy minimizes the harms and still keeps the positives. How do I argue against that from a Marxist perspective.

Well you could easily point out that he's ignoring a ton of the bad sides of capitalism such as Imperialist wars, periodic crises, environmental degradation etc. As for the supposed good sides of capitalism, although the overall standard of living of the population may increase the vast majority of people are excluded from this.

Also point out that many european welfare states were concessions made by the ruling classes in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution in order to prevent similar events occuring elsewhere. And that the lack of any serious revolutionary threat to capitalism and the ideological crisis of major parts of the left in the post-USSR era has led the social-democratic parties to veer to the right becoming almost induistinguishable from their rivals in terms of supporting the welfare state.

[infraxotl]

Did he explain why the oppression of workers and unequal distribution of wealth are necessary to uphold a productive society?

[ed miliband]

incentive for hard work and innovation

What incentives? How many people have worked hour after hour, day after day, year after year for pittance? Now how many people have 'worked their way to the top'? Did the former just not work hard enough? To argue that is insulting. And innovation is not spurred on by capitalism, and indeed, capitalism can stifle innovation, seeing use only in what is profitable.

[Imposter Marxist]

Social democracy can never get rid of exploitation. Capitalism by its definiton is exploitation. The "Increase Standard of Living" really is just giving workers excuses not to care that their lives are so hard.

As someone once said (I forget who, and im going to paraphrase here..) "Capitalism could provide universal healthcare, increase living conditions, and end wars, and in response, i'd yawn."
Capitalism cannot destroy homelessness, or starvation, and it can not stop expoltation. It will always be an unjust and unfair system.

[Broletariat]

He's using the Golden Mean Fallacy (I say don't drink arsenic, he says drink a gallon, you compromise and get the best of both worlds and drink half a gallon... you're still dead). Which isn't actually applicable here because there is no middle-ground between Capitalism and Socialism, one calls for the bourgeoisie ownership of the means of production, the other for the worker's ownership of the means of production.

[Zanthorus]

Which isn't actually applicable here because there is no middle-ground between Capitalism and Socialism, one calls for the bourgeoisie ownership of the means of production, the other for the worker's ownership of the means of production.

Indeed. It's important to point out that contrary to any rhetoric about finding a "middle way" between capitalism and socialism social-democrats are not anti-capitalists of any sort but state-capitalists.

[proudcomrade]

If your friend is specifically thinking of Europe when considering social democracy, consider how the Europeans of today are achieving & maintaining that "happy medium": Much of their current wealth is derived from exploitative transnational corporate "free" trade with some of the poorest nations in the world. Telecom companies, hotel chains & the like, are still plundering resources in many of these countries daily, then justifying it by its "creation of employment" in the affected countries. Then the smug European hypocrites enable themselves to sleep at night by solely blaming the US for it all, while happily sipping their "fair trade" organic coffee and clapping each other's backs for having done their good duty by their former slave colonies.

The EU's neoliberal "social democracy" is only socialist in that it guarantees them the wages, benefits and protections. It is not the cleverest new spin on the old three-card monte game; yet too many comrades continue falling for it.

[Crux]

The EU's neoliberal "social democracy" is only socialist in that it guarantees them the wages, benefits and protections. It is not the cleverest new spin on the old three-card monte game; yet too many comrades continue falling for it.
The fuck it does, comrade.

[automattick]

Well, let's critique at the so-called positive sides of bourgeois democracy:

(1)
incentive for hard work and innovation.From the Manifesto, Ch. II. Proletarians and Communists:

"It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work."

(2)
overall standard of living increases with the generated wealth.So what? I remember hearing Noam Chomsky address the issue of the political economy of slavery in early America. Slaves in the 17th century were worse off than they were in the 19th century, does that make slavery any better?

(3)
Negatives: Unequal distribution of wealth, oppression of workers. He forgot to mention: wage-labor; capital accumulation; commodity fetishism; mystified relations; ideology and so on.

(4)
So as he sees it, social democracy minimizes the harms and still keeps the positives.Yes, and that is why Europe occasionally plunges into racist epidemics, sovereign wealth crises, negative natural growth rates, fetishizes identity politics ("Islam v. secular, progressive Europe"), and an increasingly shrinking welfare state that cannot be supported by capital.

Your friend is on very thin ice to argue for the benefits of bourgeois democracy. I'm sure there will be other comrades who will provide more than what I have written. I would suggest reading early reactions to Bernstein's reformism by Rosa Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin, as they provide some good retorts.

[RadioRaheem84]

Well you could easily point out that he's ignoring a ton of the bad sides of capitalism such as Imperialist wars, periodic crises, environmental degradation etc. As for the supposed good sides of capitalism, although the overall standard of living of the population may increase the vast majority of people are excluded from this.


Also point out that many european welfare states were concessions made by the ruling classes in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution in order to prevent similar events occuring elsewhere. And that the lack of any serious revolutionary threat to capitalism and the ideological crisis of major parts of the left in the post-USSR era has led the social-democratic parties to veer to the right becoming almost induistinguishable from their rivals in terms of supporting the welfare state.

Another comrade brilliantly pointed out that these hypocritical welfare states actually conduct near identical US style neo-liberal business in other countries while providing their citizens with the nice safety nets (which are also eroding). Eastern Europe, for one, is heavily exploited by the West.
Japan ships off it's environmental costs to the Philippines, uses low wage labor to build materials, ship it back to Japan, pay a royalty to the corrupt leaders, and award themselves medals for being so "green" in their country.

It's pure hypocrisy. The bourgeois would never concede so many safety nets if it didn't have a reserve army of labor in the third world. That is why imperial ventures are just as vital for them as they are for the US!

The next time your friend tries to pull the wool over your eyes, tell him that the only reasons there were any reforms was because people were out in the streets being radical!


A key question thus arises: Has the moment for the renewal of U.S. socialism arrived?
Some of our friends would respond: “No. Socialism is permanently beyond our reach. The best we can hope for is the reform of capitalism along progressive lines.” They argue that capitalism can be made into a kinder and more rational system, increasingly in accord with the needs of humanity and the earth. Popular pressure, they say, can bring about enlightened government policies that will capture the benefits of capitalist economics and minimize the negative consequences. They make the case because they believe capitalism is so entrenched that it is impossible to do anything but seek reform—and they fear any hint of opposition to capitalism will marginalize them politically—or because they genuinely believe that capitalism can be tamed and made into a relatively benign and progressive society. The dream world from this perspective tends to be Scandinavian social democracy, in particular the Sweden of the Olof Palme era in the early and middle 1970s.
Sweden, during the decades of relative prosperity following the Second World War, was, in many ways, an enviable society. It enjoyed a degree of economic equality that has rarely been approached in a capitalist society, associated with high wages, superior social programs, and progressive taxation. It provided high-quality universal health care and free education up through university. The condition of women—described by Marx, after Fourier, as the measure of all human progress—was much better in Sweden, in that period, than in most capitalist societies.16 (http://monthlyreview.org/100601mcchesney-foster.php#en50)
To be sure, the Swedish model, when it was “viable,” was heavily dependent on Sweden’s stature within the imperial global order. Sweden was clearly a beneficiary of the imperialism of the North and West, and not innocently so, given its substantial military budget and arms sales in these years. It is well to remember that social democracy has never been even a remote possibility for today’s peripheral capitalist countries. It was exclusively open to the club at the center of the world system, i.e., those countries that have continually benefitted from a system of international plunder.
Sweden under Palme was not a socialist society, in our terms, but rather a corporatist, social democratic one, in which the impossible of impossibles seemed to occur for a short time under fortuitous circumstances: the irreconcilables of capital and labor were apparently reconciled.
Self-described Marxist friends have told us that, if they could push a button and move the United States to where Sweden was in the early 1970s, they would gladly forgo any hopes of transcending capitalism and creating a genuinely socialist economy. This attitude points to something of practical importance: on many matters of contemporary political organizing in the United States, the efforts of the explicitly socialist left converge with those of Keynesian left-liberals and social democrats. Together, both sides work for increased social spending, environmental sanity, equitable taxation, increased regulation, reductions in militarism, open governance, full employment, civil liberties, and workers’ rights. It is all about reducing the power of capital and increasing the power of everyone else. This is the common ground that defines the broader left in the United States, and that makes the Swedish model of the Palme era seem so attractive to many.
But the main lesson to be learned from the Sweden of left-liberal and social democratic dreams is not that capitalism can be reformed and therefore need not be fundamentally challenged. Instead, the main lesson is that those progressives who aspire to radical social reforms can only hope to have sufficient leverage to win these reforms if the threat of socialism is looming on the horizon. In Sweden’s case: the Soviet Union across the Baltic. The left can expect to achieve most in every respect when the threat it represents is one to be taken seriously.
The current and pathetically weak state of the progressive forces in the United States points to the dangers of political demobilization. On issue after issue, progressives tend to garner a significant percentage of the American people’s support, yet they do not have anything remotely close to commensurate political influence. The recent debacle over health care, in which the Obama administration and its Congressional allies successfully played the left-wing and voting base of the Democratic Party for patsies and delivered on a gold platter a bill to the liking of the corporate sector, is the most recent evidence. Of course part of the liberal-left’s weakness in U.S. politics is due to the news media, unfavorable election laws, and a number of other factors with which progressives are all too familiar. But a more significant reason for that weakness is that nobody in power fears the liberal-left—and no one should. The liberal-left tends to trip over itself as it establishes its pro-market bona fides for decision makers. “Take us seriously, pretty please; we are not really radicals and certainly not socialists, we want to make your free market system work better, and don’t we have some jolly-good ideas,” they seem to say.
The only way to exact major reforms from those in power is to show them that we really mean it; to convey the message that if the real demands of the people, expressed in mass movements, are not met by the system (or are met only in very limited ways), then we as a body will make serious attempts to accomplish these ends by transcending the current system of power. Think of the great progressive reforms in modern U.S. history. The Wagner Act. Social Security. The Voting Rights Act. These came when those in power were petrified. They arose because of mass revolts from below, and because radicals recognized that it was the peculiar responsibility of the left to help mobilize the working class to fight for their own interests and their own needs—to take to the streets and fight power head on.
Consider why rulers in other nations, like France or Greece, tend to have greater difficulty implementing cutbacks in social programs during crises: Because, when they look out the window, they see a mass of people who would threaten the perpetuation of their system, if the vested interests were to engineer a class war from above in an attempt to turn back the clock. This makes the position of the capitalist class in such countries much more tenuous. The ability of the Swedish Social Democrats to win their tremendous reforms arose through the struggles of a working-class movement that was always populated with “extremist” elements open to expropriating private capital altogether.


http://monthlyreview.org/100601mcchesney-foster.php

Monthly Review said it best! :thumbup1: