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  • The Tragedy of Social Democracy by Sirvan Karimi
  • Ingo Schmidt
Sirvan Karimi, The Tragedy of Social Democracy (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing 2015)

Karimi opens his book with the claim that “existing literature does not provide an adequate theorization of the transformation social democracy has undergone.” He continues: “It is a central aim of this book to make a modest contribution to the understanding of this historical evolution.” (2) However, instead of telling a new story or giving the existing literature a new twist, he serves the all-too familiar narrative about the ups and downs of social democracy from its early revolutionary days to its marriage with Keynesianism and its Third Way turn. Like in many other books before, we meet Marx again as the one who gave diverse socialist groupings a coherent outlook around which parties of the Second International could rally after Marx’s death. Of course, we then meet Bernstein who thought the revolutionary road could be abandoned and Kautsky who tried to reconcile revolutionary principles and reformist practice. Karimi reminds us that these efforts failed. Focusing on electoral politics and seeing parliamentary representation as a countervailing power to capitalist rule, Kautsky eventually sided with Bernstein while the revolutionary tradition was left to the Bolsheviks. Contrary to social-democratic self-perceptions, Karimi, drawing on Marxist theories of the state, argues that the power of social democratic representation in parliament was actually quite limited. The reason that social democrats could achieve many of their reformist goals was not an ever-increasing number of social democratic members of parliament but the emergence of Keynesianism and its fusion with welfare states, which, prior to this emergence, had only existed in embryonic forms. Keynesianism, Karimi argues, “was a structural necessity to maintain bourgeois hegemony” (28) and welfare states are “the political manifestation of socio-economic responses by the state to overcome the inherent contradictions of capitalist social relations.” (31) However, the very success of the Keynesian welfare state also paved the way for its downfall. Social reform, full employment, and escalating wage demands caused a profit squeeze that turned the welfare state, according to neoliberal challengers of Keynesian hegemony, into the “source of all social, economic, and political ills.” (57) Capitalists sought to restore profits and class power through industrial restructuring and fiscal restraint. Social democrats with their focus on winning seats but lacking a substantive basis of power at the point of production found no way to fight off the capitalist offensive. Eventually they adopted the neoliberal gospel in the name of a Third Way, which, according to social democratic intellectuals, presented an alternative to the redistributive policies of the Keynesian welfare state but [End Page 391] also to unfettered market competition unleashed by neoliberalism. It didn’t take long, though, until working class voters found out that the opportunities that Third Way social democrats promised to everybody only existed for individuals belonging to the propertied classes. Not surprisingly, then, many working class voters abandoned social democracy and thereby threw social democratic parties into a deep crisis. To get out of this crisis, Karimi suggests the socialization of investment, which would shift democratic engagement from parliamentary superstructures to the economic basis of capitalism.

Karimi’s account of the transformations of social democracy is in line with historical facts and thus sounds rather convincing. Since there is no denying that the parliamentary road to social reform, maybe even socialism, led to a dead end, his conclusion that economic democracy could offer an alternative is also compelling. However, closer scrutiny raises doubts whether Karimi’s account offers much of a road map from parliamentary to economic democracy. His argument rests on the conviction that, in capitalism, power is located at the point of production whereas states are merely condensed and institutionalized expressions of class conflict, parliaments little more than institutions for mass integration. While this may be so, it begs the question why these institutions allowed social democrats to wield enough power that let capitalists consider a class compromise acceptable in the postwar era. While Karimi denies social democrats having any such power when the class compromise was struck, he assumes that there must have been some power...

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