I'm looking for an Anarchist (or Marxist) critique of modern Social-Democracy

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Can anyone recommend?

Joseph Kay's picture
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with a bit of imagination, Chapter 4 of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle works. full of dense hegalian/marxian language though.

"the representation of the working class radically opposes itself to the working class."

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I can't think of anything pertaining to modern social democracy specifically, but for a treatment of historical social democracy (and reformism in general) there is always Marx' Critique of the Gotha Program
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm

Bakunin's Critique of the German Social Democratic Program
http://libcom.org/library/a-critique-of-the-german-social-democratic-program-bakunin

Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution?
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/index.htm

Malatesta on reformism
http://libcom.org/library/reformism-malatesta

and Otto Ruhle's "The Revolution is not a Party Affair"
http://libcom.org/library/the-revolution-is-not-a-party-affair-otto-ruhle

(also see http://libcom.org/search/apachesolr_search/reformism?filters=type%3Alibrary)

A lot of these are very relevant for arguing against contemporary reformist politics as well, but modern social democracy does not even pretend to be applying marxist ideas anymore; criticism of it is essentially criticism of bourgeois politics in general, and you can find that in just about any book advancing anarchist or libertarian marxist ideas.

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As I recall (though my memory might be faulty and I don't have time to check right now) Dauve's Fascism/Anti-Fascism deals pretty extensively with the pitfalls of social democracy.

http://libcom.org/dst

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Pannekoek and Gorter also wrote some good critical stuff on social democracy (mostly German and Dutch). Check on their texts at the Marxists Internet Archive (articles written in the 1910-20 period, mostly). I agree with Vlad that what gets called "social democracy" (or "socialist" in continental Europe) today is far weaker than what was called that 100 years ago, it is really just welfare-state liberalism. They don't even pretend anymore (and haven't for decades) that eventually full nationalization of the economy will lead to the abolition of capitalism.

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Specifically:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1927/sdc.htm

Which is Pannekoek's "Social Democracy and Communism" (1927), first written in 1919.

allybaba's picture
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Im sure Antonio Gramsci wrote alot about this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci

BigLittleJ's picture
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JK is being uber-modest and didn't mention his own very excellent blog on leftism/social-democracy. This deals very well with social democracy on the theoretical level.

~J.

arminius's picture
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I don't have huge problems with any of the suggestions so far, (in fact many of them I like very much!), but the question was *modern* social democracy, and I just wonder if any of these somewhat old works could qualify on that score? I mean, I guess it depends on what the original questioner meant by 'modern social democracy', doesn't it?

Joseph Kay's picture
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well i'd say social democracy doesn't exist in mainstream UK political parties anymore since the pretence of representing workers has been completely abandoned. it persists in the trade unions though, so these recent articles by libcom people might be useful:

A brief account of Unison's national conference, 2008
Cost of living pay increase struggles interview, 2008
Pay: what went wrong in 2007?

BigLittleJ's picture
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I think there is a distinct tendency of social-democratic/labour parties getting 'modern' and dropping a lot of their principles in order to keep up with the times. You could call this 'modern social democracy', I guess, though it does represent a break from the politics of social democracy. I think Aufheben might have written an article or two on the subject a while back...

EDIT: Yeah, here we go. Aufheben gets the goods once again-

Analysis of New Labour 'Workfare' in the UK
social democracy in retreat part 1
social democracy in retreat part 2

~J.

Joseph Kay's picture
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BigLittleJ's picture
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That's the baby.

EDIT: Yeah, we actually submitted those within the same minute. I'm catching up...

~J.

Joined: 14-06-09

Hello papaspce. One of the best books I have read ever, is "Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism" - by Franz Jakubowski (1936). I learned a lot of that book.You can find it here on Libcom.org. red star

pannekoek-bakunin

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Sorry for the delay--
Thank you all so much for the helpful links and suggestions!