Nor do I believe I have any illusions about what they can accomplish. The leaders of such parties often renege on their programmatic commitments when they are elected, and even agree to rollback previously hard-won gains, as you note. But I think many leftists, including perhaps yourself, have a simplistic and moralizing view that these leaders do what they do because they're venal and corrupt and cowardly. Some are that, as in any institution, but the actions of most are driven by the level of class struggle, which arises out of social conditions. When union and political party leaders succumb to pressure from the capitalists, it's usually because of how they read the relationship of forces, how far they calculate each side is willing to go - whether the capitalists, for example, are willing and able to follow through on their threat to provoke job losses through capital flight, and how willing and able are their own supporters to confront this power in defence of their own interests. Invariably, any deal that is cut in the political and industrial arena is based on this calculation.
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I don't think social democracy plays a treacherous role simply because its
leaders are craven or corrupt, which they usaully are. There is also a
sociological basis for the way they act. You seem to regard them as well-intentioned
pragmatists, who will carry their reformist agenda as far as the balance of
class forces realistically permits. I view them less benignly. Leaders of the
social democratic type--union officials, party politicians--comprise a social
stratum, with definite interests and a definite M.O. Their role as brokers
between the capitalists, on the one hand, and workers and other subordinate classes,
on the other, sometimes involves real reforms, especially when the lower
classes are fed up, and things are threatening to get out of hand. But it means,
above all, maintaining the class hierarchy in which they act as brokers. This
is why they are so deathly afraid of any mass mobilizations that could go
beyond the electoral arena, and why, when the chips are down, they will invariably
side with the ruling classes against their base. We don't have to go back to
the much revisited Germany of 1918-19, where the Social Democrats in power
suppressed the Spartacus rising and murdered its leaders, for examples of how they
function. We can see it in France, where Jospin's Socialist government used
his tepid 35-hour workweek legislation to distract people from the biggest wave
of privatizations carried out by any French government so far. Or in Bolivia,
where, it seems, Evo Morales is acting to save a rapidly deteriorating
situation for the elite. The fact that we live in a right-wing period, in which the
capitalist classes (especially in the Anglophone world) have little use for
social democracy and revile even its rhetoric shouldn't blind us to the role it
has played historically, and is playing elsewhere even now, in propping up
capitalism and selling its neoliberal agenda to the non-capitalist majority.
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