The Revolutionary Roots of Social Democracy

We have to divide the social democratic movement into prewar and postwar. And by war, I mean World War II, not World War I. I think, in the prewar period, that is, the social democratic movement of the first half of the twentieth century, there was a very robust understanding of the bourgeois state and the limits it puts on the chances for progressive change and progressive legislation.

It was not the kind of theory you see written in academic texts today, or since the 1980s and ’90s, when Marxists developed what we call modern state theory. But modern state theory — as developed by people like Nicos Poulantzas, Ralph Miliband, Fred Block, and Claus Offe — really built on the insights or the assertions that early twentieth century social democrats made, assertions which were very sharp and very smart, but weren’t articulated into a full theory.

What the Left did in the latter part of the twentieth century was turn those earlier assertions and affirmations into a theory, making explicit what was implicit.

What was implicit in the early parts of the twentieth century among social democrats was the understanding that the state — even a democratic state, which was in some way beholden to the voters, most of whom were workers — gave greater power to capitalists, even though workers had greater votes. That was essential to their understanding.

This is not as well encapsulated in Lenin’s State and Revolution, but the State and Revolution is not a representative text of how social democrats thought about the state. That book was forced down the throat of the global left because when the Bolshevik party became the most important and most famous communist party in the world, it became kind of a religious text. But it doesn’t express the entirety of what social democrats thought because its own theory of the state is actually quite impoverished. It isn’t a very well-worked-out theory of the state.

The more common understanding of the state was that it is not a naked instrument of class rule because once you got the democratic vote, capitalists couldn’t rely on the state just to be a naked instrument of rule. You had to have a more sophisticated mediation, a more sophisticated approach, to keeping the working class in line. You couldn’t just keep using the military or the cops against them because they had the right to vote.

The more sophisticated perspective essentially said that, even though the state’s class bias can be somewhat mediated or weakened through the vote, it will still remain a class state. Because it’s still a class state, it’s going to take real struggle, real power, and real threats of economic disruption from the working class to get legislators and to get parties to give us reforms, to give us legislation that’s going to make our lives better. So they did, and we know they understood this because that’s the strategy they used.

All social democratic parties — regardless of whether they were fighting in their own minds for socialism or whether they were fighting in their own minds for merely a form of capitalism — all of them had one thing in common, which was a very, very deep anchor in the working class, a very close relationship to trade unions, and a commitment to using the power of trade unions and of workers in their neighborhoods and in their other institutions to press their interests onto the state.

In other words, even though they were committed to using the power of the vote, they never exclusively relied on it because they knew that the vote would never be enough to bend the state to their interests and to their needs. It would have to involve class struggle. It would have to involve actually taking on power where it really exists in capitalism, which is not inside the state. It’s inside the investment prerogative of capitalists. They all knew this.

They didn’t articulate this perspective as well as the later left in the 1970s and ’80s did, but they all knew this. That was the theory that informed their practice. And that theory deepened and grew as their experience with the state grew.

Later on, it got, in many ways, weaker, not better. But in this part of their history — the first half of the twentieth century — they had a pretty robust understanding of the bourgeois state. The sad thing is, the current left is not even at the level of the early left, of the social democratic left of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.