The Limits and Dangers of Social Democracy
The Case for Its Ideological Death
The Limits and Dangers of Social Democracy
I am thinking about the Weimar Republic because its lessons echo the current-day actions of democratic socialists in the United States. Particularly, I am thinking about how the center-left social democrats (Social Democratic Party of Germany; SPD) joined forces with liberals and other center parties to create a barrier between revolution (communist and fascist). The social democrats supported the Republic over revolt—patriotism to the nation. This is due, in part, to the SPD’s belief that it could reign in the corporate elements of the Republic and “empower the democratic self-organization of workers.”1 The SPD believed it had the power to influence the state with its loyalty to the state.2
In 1933, the Republic fell to Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi), partly due to this coalition of social democrats, liberals, democrats, and centrists who actively stood in the way of and undermined communist rise to power—and an alternative vision for Germany in the face of a strengthening Nazi Party. During the Weimar Republic, issues of hyperinflation, economic depression, war, and deteriorating social and economic conditions set the stage for the rise of Nazism, paralleling conditions today.
The Social Democratic Party’s Marxist roots gave way to reformism through electoral politics. The SPD was successful in getting legislative concessions for social welfare reform and worker’s rights policies by working closely with liberal parties. They stood as the progressive force, improving working conditions and wages, advocating for worker unions, and creating worker’s councils. How could we question that? However, the party splintered into reformist pro-war, and radical, anti-war Marxist wings, where the radical Marxists formed the Independent Socal Democratic Party of Germany. In an act of solidarity with the left, the SPD “unleashed the Freikorps, voluntary paramilitary units, to suppress the activities of “extreme” left-wing radicals.”3 These actions contributed to the divisions among the left, leaving the door open for a unified right.4
The social democrats were concerned about threats to the Republic from communist and nazi parties. They rallied behind centrist Chancellor Brüning, despite his inability to stabilize the economy and address rising unemployment and hyperinflation. Social democrats in Germany feared autocratic rule and wanted to maintain their gains for the German working class. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) supported the newly formed parliamentary system and assisted in establishing the Weimar coalition government as part of the state-building efforts.
Over the years during the slow fall of the Republic, the National Socialist German Workers' Party was gaining support and votes. Still, the centrist government under the new Chancellors Papen and Schleicher was more fearful of increased support for communist parties. Papen forced a coalition with the National Socialist German Workers' Party and with Hitler to bring them into the centrist government with limited powers. On January 30, 1933, Hitler legally became Chancellor of Germany.
The above is a crude retelling of the Weimar Republic’s history, but I use it to show how we are again observing this pattern in the U.S. We continuously see liberals, centrists, and social democrats form an alliance to create an electoral bloc in an attempt to combat the far right. The lesson of the Weimar Republic illustrates that the continued active choice to reject communism leads to the strengthening rise and power of fascist ideology. The U.S. has a long history of rejecting third world communism in favor of an abstract, European, and “pragmatic” vision of liberal democracy that excludes non-white people and ignores a race, imperialism, and settler colonialism analysis. Considering the lessons from the Weimar Republic, it's important to recognize the social democrat project's limited capacity to develop the masses politically and combat fascism. In the Weimar Republic, actions that undermined Marxist influences among the left led to intra-party divisions that weakened the social democrats and their ability to maintain power.5 To the social democrat, it is easier to try to achieve (the veneer of) power through alliances and concessions with the liberal and conservative establishment than to take power through alliances with the Marxist left. The latter requires a critique and rejection of our existing relationship to the state.
Social democracy, as expressed in the U.S., is an anti-communist political project centered on electoral and legislative fixes to the capitalist system over time. It seeks to “make things better” for the working class through redistributionist social welfare programs, worker unions, and “rights-based” policies such as universal basic income, universal healthcare, and an expanded public sector, without fundamentally subverting the racist liberal capitalist system. This puts the durability and sustainability of, and the ability to scale these policies at risk of undermining and weakening by the capitalist state and private entities. Its methods for change involve electoral politics and retrieving concessions from the State and private actors in exchange for social welfare and worker’s rights policies and programs. To be clear, these “non-reformist reforms” aim to improve people’s immediate conditions and address the consequences of capitalism in the short term. I am not questioning the importance of meeting people’s immediate social, economic, financial, and health needs. The problem is that no long-term vision or strategic plan exists beyond addressing short-term needs, leading to crisis and chaos.
Here is the core tension between a social democratic project and a decolonial, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, abolitionist, and degrowth communist project—an inability to address imperialism. For the European-based social democrat project, this means recognizing and respecting the human and political rights of historically marginalized and non-white populations. The fundamental difference between the two political philosophies is that a communist project aims to reaffirm respect for and the rehumanization of colonized human life by exposing and presenting alternative ways of existence and thinking and developing this as a lifelong culture of practice. This goes beyond short-term and immediate pragmatic fixes to make things better. The danger with social democracy is its dismissiveness to international solidarity in favor of, frankly, an individualistic and nationalist attitude that puts the comforts of the imperial core first over international solidarity. We see this when democratic socialists and progressives prioritize the reforms to the National Labor Relations Board and President Biden’s rhetoric on union support over rejecting the very democratic administration that is presiding over the Palestinian Holocaust.
Social democracy will always be fundamentally weakened by its alliance with the liberal establishment and the state.; so long as the liberal state provides the concessions social democrats and other progressives demand, social democrats will not seek a radical transformation of the state. Social democrats get their power through alliances with the establishment—not from within. Social democrats are not radical opportunists—they lack the political deftness to take power. They struggle to confront the state in the hopes that they can push it leftwards and achieve marginal political wins for the working class. The state absorbs and co-opts the demands of the left into its broader social welfare functions, effectively deradicalizing and depoliticizing any revolutionary potential beyond addressing immediate needs.6
Without an overarching long-term strategic framework that fundamentally changes the state’s political philosophical orientation from liberal to dialectical,7 the risk remains that we stay stuck in a cycle of economism and political crisis. The left risks compromising its values and conforming to political capitalist pressures. It’s easy to dismiss communism as fantasy “woo woo,” but under social democratic power, historically, we have not seen the level of radical transformation needed to address the breadth of the issues of our time—an expanded corporate feudal system, historical levels of inflation and homelessness, and record resource hoarding, theft, and corporate land grabs. Liberal pragmatism is the death of radical progress. It goes nowhere. Communism can be “pragmatic,” too. Under existing political conditions—because we cannot live in the abstract—we fight for the farthest limits of our imagination to achieve self-affirmation. This is more than providing relief in the form of slow drips from the consequences of colonial capitalism. This includes “non-reformist reforms” that represent steps toward getting us toward this broader project, like the nationalization of industries, expanded public housing and worker coops, and expropriation. I will acknowledge that this can be in tension with anarchist goals, but this is a conflict that we must embrace. Meeting immediate needs is a “by any means necessary” principle—engaging in political, social, and economic disruption that subverts, undermines, and weakens the fascist state.
At the same time, we need long-term planning that builds new social and economic institutions, new ways of being and laboring, and governance structures that will prepare us for taking political power. There are differing theories and approaches to addressing the question of the state that I won’t get into here and have noted in other pieces, but the ability to collectively and democratically develop a new theory of the state and our relationship to it is an important step towards a communist project. The inability to move past working with the state is where social democracy fails in progressing us toward a place where the masses can expand our imaginations to take power and be the state—a state of full humanism and life-affirmation. This requires imagination that social democracy cannot give. We must move on.
Maischak, Lars. (2024).
Id. (2024).
Jerabek, Martin. 2012. The Question of Democracy between the Two World Wars: The Case of the Constitutional and Political Crisis of the Weimar Republic and the First Republic of Austria. WHBR.
Id. (Martin, pg. 115).
Id.
Bazile, Sabrina. 2024. Theorizing a Framework for Communist Cooperative Governance for a People’s Communal State/Zone.
Id. (Bazile).