>>point taken, but what, if any, was the role of banking in this?
doug replied:
>Social democracy seems compatible only with regulated financial sectors,
>domestic and foreign. Once a financial structure moves towards a more
>(Anglo-)American model, all liberal hell breaks loose. Of course this
isn't
>the only mechanism at work, but it's important.
this is the reply I wrote mainly to Sam, but it extends the above, perhaps in a quite different direction.
Sam,
Sam, you may be right that the division between the mensheviks and the bolsheviks is one of means. but it is important to note also that the split cemented itself in the heat of WW1 and the ease with which the social democrats sided with 'their governments', the geopolitical 'interests' of 'their nation-states'.
a more important distinction I think would be to note that social democracy was always a set of strategies available only to a small set of countries running either (or both) big trade surpluses or a 'labour shortage'; that it presupposes a national framework that is no longer available. Australian social democracy was built on the basis of the 'white australia policy', which is perhaps where it is returning to: in the face of (the threat of) capital flight, social democracy's national outlook can do little more than entail the continuing regulation of labour (movements).
the redistributive aims of social democracy are blown out of the water not by a decision of the treacherous leadership to betray 'founding principles' but by the international character of capital.
I am not so much interested in the distinction 'reform or revolution', since I think it was put abstractly then and barely makes any sense today. there are reforms which open up the possibilities, and reforms which close them off - that's a more important distinction to make as I see it; as well as noting that revolutions are not reducible armed struggles, since armed struggles are not necessarily revolutionary in either character or aim. so, this is not the distinction I was making.
I also think Michael's point is well made, but I would think this contradictory function is the sting in the tail of every aspiration to take control of the capitalist state.
cheers, Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au