Democratic Socialism

A: al-ishtirākīya al-dīmuqrāṭīya.- F: socialisme démocratique. – G: demokratischer Sozialismus. – R: demokratičeskij socializm. – S: socialismo democrático. – C: minzhu shehui zhuyi 民 主 社 会 主 义

DS is the political-strategic vision of the socialist/social-democratic part of the labour movement, which, after 1917, voted against the Leninist concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and in favour of the unbreakable link between socialism and democracy. ‘Dictatorship of the proletariat’ or ‘democratic socialism’: this was the dividing line between the communist and socialist parts of the divided labour movement from 1917-1989 (see Grebing/Meyer 1992, 29 et sq). Though ever since the former communist parties re-established themselves as democratic-socialist parties, the term has lost its meaning as a shibboleth.

In the early days of the socialist movement, itself a part of the democratic movement, the interlocking of democracy and socialism as a single goal was still taken for granted. As early as 1845 Karl Grün spoke of ‘DS’ (82; cited in Conze 1972, 886), and in 1849 Proudhon wrote in his Confessions of a Revolutionary: ‘Louis Blanc represents governmental socialism, revolution by power, as I represent DS, revolution by the people’ (1849, Chapter 12; quoted in Sotelo 1987, 443). In the same work, he speaks of the ‘democratic socialists’ as the party of the future (1849, Chapter 1).

This original concept of DS, as defined by Proudhon, has receded into history behind the statism of both the 2^nd and 3^rd Internationals. After the collapse of state socialism and the failure of the socialist movement’s statist transformation strategy to achieve its goals, libertarian traditions, such as those found in anarchism and the theory of council democracy, will continue to play an important role in the reformulation of DS in the future.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s statements on democracy do not contain any systematic theory, they reacted in an ‘ad hoc way…to changing political circumstances’ (Harrington 1972, 46). Before 1848, they joined the democratic movement. In 1847, Engels wrote: ‘As long as democracy has not been achieved, thus long do Communists and democrats fight side by side.’ (MECW 6/299 [MEW 4/317], see 349, 368, 528 [372, 392, 502]) – The years following the failed revolution saw the beginning of the ‘the separation of the younger bourgeois liberal democratic movement from the older democratic tradition of the poor people’ (Rosenberg 1939, 45). As the class coalition between workers, peasants and petty bourgeois broke down in Germany and France (131), bourgeois democrats separated from the workers movement. The concept of “democracy” had ‘been taken over into the camp of the wealthy bourgeoisie’ (302), of bourgeois left-wing liberalism. In The Class Struggles in France, Marx writes about the republic in relation to the peasant’s situation: ‘The constitutional republic is the dictatorship of his united exploiters; the social-democratic, the Red republic, is the dictatorship of his allies.’ (MECW 10/122 [MEW 7/84]) – It should be noted that this formulation applies the concept of dictatorship to both sides. Michael Harrington (1972, 50) quotes Sidney Hook’s observation from 1933 that ‘wherever we find a state [in Marx] we find a dictatorship’, and continues: ‘Therefore the most libertarian of bourgeois democracies is a dictatorship in the sense that the economic wealth and power of the rich contradicts the theoretical political equality of all citizens.’ (ibid.)

The fact that Marx described the relative autonomy of the political sphere (e.g. in the 18^th Brumaire), but did not present any corresponding general concept, led a student like Karl Kautsky to stereotypically repeat the formula of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, and, in turn, to an abstract recognition of the concept of democracy after the First World War. Lenin, on the other hand, was able to use the congealed formula of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (MECW 24/95 [MEW 19/28]) to advance a quasi-legitimation of the arbitrariness of the revolutionary Soviet state.

Although the social democrats in the German Empire took the inextricable link between socialism and democracy for granted, this link did not serve as their starting point for theorising the socialist transformation—beyond the expectation of revolution—which was to succeed the “collapse” of capitalism. The question of democracy only became a topic during the revisionist dispute. After the split in the labour movement in 1917, it became central.

In the revisionist debate between Eduard Bernstein, who described democracy as ‘the form in which socialism will be realised’ (1899, 142) and political democracy as ‘the abolition of class rule’ (143), and Rosa Luxemburg, who distinguished the ‘social kernel from the political form of bourgeois democracy’ (1918, 77), the opposing viewpoints among social democrats had become all too apparent. They came to a head in the confrontation between Lenin and Kautsky. These positions marked the differences between a gradualist transformation strategy within bourgeois democracy, a revolutionary overcoming of bourgeois democracy through socialist democracy, and a dictatorship of the proletariat operating as a proletarian democracy.

Interwar period. – At its 10^th Congress, the Labour and Socialist International stated in a resolution that socialism ‘cannot seek to suppress Democracy: its historical mission, on the contrary, is to carry Democracy to completion’ (ILO 1920). In a Manifesto to the Workers (session 11/4-5/1920), the International is even more firm, ‘that it is waging the battle for the ideals of democratic socialism as against the slavery of capitalism on the one hand and the tyrannical dictatorship of Bolshevism on the other’ (Protokoll Görlitz 1921, 45, cited in Investigation 1930, 157).

Only when something previously taken for granted is called into question must it be emphasised, such as the link between democracy and socialism. At the Görlitz Party Congress in 1921, Friedrich Stampfer claimed credit for Social Democracy having saved Germany from Bolshevism: this ‘came about because we in Germany had politically educated democratic socialists who rejected Bolshevism’ (Protokoll Görlitz, 305). He then identified the state and social democracy without distinction: ‘state and socialism, state and social democracy belong together’ (ibid.).

This substantialist view of the state corresponded to the later social democratic legalism of the final Weimar years. The concept of economic democracy, advocated above all by Naphtali, replaced the attitude of waiting for the collapse of capitalism. Behind this was the thought that one could arrive at socialism in an evolutionary way, for instance through the expansion of the public economy, or that the road to socialism was prepared by the fact that in capitalism the ‘socialist principle of planned production’ (Rudolf Hilferding at the SPD party congress in Kiel, 1927, cited in 2020, 572) prevailed.

Naphtali’s concept of economic democracy as a gradualist model for the transition to a socialist society considered the following steps of democratisation necessary: 1. democratisation of the educational system, elimination of educational privileges; 2. democratisation of labour law (industrial democracy); 3. self-administration of the economy with simultaneous state requirements; 4. expansion of public enterprises, cooperatives and the unionised cooperative economy.

The advocates of economic democracy, who saw the ‘socialist principle of planned production’ already at work in organised capitalism, were in fact confusing the capitalist law of value with the social planning of the allocation of labour in a socialist society (see Huster 1977, 437). The concept ultimately foundered on the class action of capital and the reality of the world economic crisis.

During the Weimar Republic, the gulf between programmatic discussion (the path to socialism, overcoming capitalism) and the realpolitik of those acting in parliament, the beginnings of which can be traced back to the German Empire, was increasingly apparent. Ever since it has led to the separation of the levels of theory and practice of the social movement, which had once been thought to belong together. In 1911, Robert Michels came up with a theory of how the party form integrates the social movement into parliamentarianism. Despite his empirical impressionism, his portrayal of the former radical who now feels ‘bound’ to the movement and the accompanying fading of theoretical convictions remains relevant.

The left-wing split of the Social Democrats, the SAP, which substantiated the failure of reformism, drew the following pessimistic conclusion from the threatened downfall of the Weimar Republic, i.e. Brüning’s state of emergency measures: ‘the working class can neither come to power nor realise socialism by means of democracy and parliamentarism’ (according to Paul Fröhlich in the foreword to the Declaration of Principles, cited by Drechsler 1965, 223 et sq). The SAP sided with Lenin in the (inconsequential) theoretical dispute over the question of the transition to socialism, adopting the formula of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Otto Bauer’s attempt at mediation. – In his analyses, the leader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party assumed an intermediary position between Bolshevism and Social Democracy. Otto Bauer defined in traditional Marxist terms the roots of the political hegemony of the bourgeoisie, which rests ‘upon the means of their economic power, by means of tradition, as well as through the press, the school, and the church, where the majority of people are held under their intellectual influence’ (1926, 501), as stated in the Linz Party Program of 1926, which he helped write. He described bourgeois democracy as ‘minority rule of the big bourgeoisie through the majority government of bourgeois mass parties’ (1928, 258, fn. 26). Accordingly, the Christian Socials and the Greater Germans appeared as ‘people’s parties’ (WA 2, 209).

According to Bauer, ‘bourgeois democracy’ is ‘a transitional phase between the monarchies of the past based on privileged suffrage, in which the big bourgeoisie not only had the monopoly on concentrated property but also the monopoly on political power, and the socialist democracy of the future, in which the working people will not only have the political power to form governments but also the economic power over the concentrated means of production and circulation on which every government depends.’ (WA 9, 209)

The Linz Program justifies the ‘defensive use of force’ by the working class in the event of violent resistance by the bourgeoisie against a socialist majority government in order to ‘break the resistance of the bourgeoisie by means of dictatorship’ (WA 5, 448). But the democratically conquered power of the state should also be exercised ‘with the means, in the form and under all guarantees of democracy’, especially ‘safeguarding all democratic freedoms’ because ‘the preservation of full democratic freedoms protects above all the proletariat itself from a rule exercised in its name from becoming a rule over the proletariat’ (449).

In light of the experience of fascism, Otto Bauer in his writings from exile comes closer once more to a traditional scheme. In Between Two World Wars, he argues against the ‘doctrinaires of DS’ that ‘democracy and dictatorship of the proletariat should not be opposed as irreconcilable opposites. The dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing more than a state conquered by the proletariat strong and durable enough to transform capitalist society into a socialist one. The forms such a state power will take will depend on the historical circumstances [...].’ (WA 4, 210 et sq.)

In his writings from exile, Bauer ascribes to revolutionary Marxism, from the experience of defeat, the function of ‘transmitting to revolutionary socialism the great legacy of the struggles for democracy, the legacy of DS […], to reformist socialism the great legacy of the proletarian revolutions […]. It must teach the working masses to understand that only a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat can definitively destroy the economic power and ideological means of domination of the capitalist bourgeoisie […]. It must unite in this conception of history the ethos of democratic socialism and the pathos of revolutionary socialism into a higher unity’ (WA 4, 306). But Bauer did not make a decisive course correction as a revolutionary socialist who wanted to gain power by democratic means. Certainly, democracy is ‘mere form; whether this form is filled with capitalist, peasant or proletarian content depends on the social factors of power’ (WA 2, 346 et sq.). And Bauer also addresses the crucial problem left by Marx’s theory of revolution, that is, the ‘working class’ as substantialised revolutionary subject: ‘If the Social Democratic Workers’ Party […] succeeds in uniting the manual and intellectual workers in town and country, and the working class succeeds in winning over the nearby strata of the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia as allies, then the Social Democratic Workers’ Party will win the majority of the people.’ (WA 5, 446)

Yet the social democrats did not succeed in achieving this homogenisation anywhere. As early as 1899, Rosa Luxemburg addressed the problem in another form: ‘The production relations of capitalist society approach more and more the production relations of socialist society. But on the other hand, its political and juridical relations established between capitalist society and socialist society a steadily rising wall. This wall is not overthrown, but is on the contrary strengthened and consolidated by the development of social reforms and the course of democracy.’ (1908, 65 et sq.; see also N. Leser in Spatzenegger 1991, 102-06). Had not the expectation of revolution already become unrealistic in the second half of the 19^th cent. due to the development of military weapons — with the one exception of the collapse of the three Empires in 1917/1918 (see Rosenberg 1939, 301)? At the turn of the century, had not the ‘living machine’ of bureaucratic organisation provided ‘the housing of that future serfdom’, of which Max Weber once said that ‘perhaps, men may have to submit powerlessly, just like the slaves in the ancient state of Egypt, if they consider that the ultimate and only value by which the conduct of their affairs is to be decided is good administration and provision for their needs by officials (that is “good” in the “pure” technical sense of rational administration)’ (1994, 158)? Finally, in the 1920s, in addition to the ‘steel housing of modern industrial work’ (157), the transformative possibilities of social development were limited by the emergence of a levelling mass culture as well as the differentiation of interests of various classes and their social milieus.

DS after the Second World War. — In contrast to dogmatic Marxism-Leninism of the communist parties, the Socialist International (SI) proclaimed a pluralism of approaches at its founding congress in Frankfurt on July 3, 1951: ‘DS is an international movement which does not demand a rigid uniformity of approach. Whether Socialists build their faith on Marxist or other methods of analysing society, whether they are inspired by religious or humanitarian principles, they all strive for the same goal — a system of social justice, better living, freedom and world peace.’ (SI 1951, Aims and Tasks)

In contrast to the dictatorships of Communist regimes, the Socialist International declared: ‘Without freedom there can be no Socialism. Socialism can be achieved only through democracy. Democracy can be fully realised only through Socialism.’ (ibid.) The economic-political part of the declaration calls for a new economic order in which ‘production must be planned in the interests of the people. Such planning is incompatible with the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. It requires effective democratic control of the economy.’ (ibid.)

The Godesberg Program of the SPD in 1959 also spoke of the various sources of DS, which ‘in Europe is rooted in Christian ethics, humanism and classical philosophy’ (SPD 1959, 1). — Following Leonard Nelson’s scientific justification of ethical socialism, Willi Eichler (1972) saw the foundation of socialism in the basic values mentioned in the Godesberg Program: ‘Freedom, justice and solidarity’ (SPD 1959, 1). While these basic values convey an ethical idea, they are underpinned by the political practice of the ‘ethicists of responsibility’. Thus, the Godesberg Program, according to the principle of “the realisation of socialism through democracy and the fulfilment of democracy through socialism”, includes formulations such as ‘freedom for employers to exercise their initiative as well as free competition are essential conditions of a Social Democratic economic policy’ (5), which subordinate the basic values to the imperatives of market forces.

A Marxist foundation of DS was and is based on Marx’s categorical imperative to ‘overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being’ (MECW 3/182 [MEW 1/385]; see v. Oertzen 1980, 92). Such an approach, however, recognises the connection between legitimising values and economic structures of domination, which prohibits the philosophical deduction of political programmes from ‘basic values’ (ibid.).

The following passage in the Godesberg Program could still be understood as a weak reflection of the erstwhile demands for planning production in the interest of the people (according to the SI 1951): ‘Effective public control must prevent the abuse of economic power. The most important means to this end are investment control and control over the forces dominating the market.’ (SPD 1959, 7)

Regarding the SPD’s use of the term ‘DS’ (especially after the 1972 elections, see Fenner 1977), Klaus v. Beyme (1975, 20) remarks: ‘One could imagine a DS that does not realise the hegemony of a communist party, but is organised in a council-democratic, pluralistic manner. On the other hand, no socialism is conceivable which renounces the socialisation of the means of production and resigns itself to a market economy mitigated by selective state intervention. The use of term “DS” in the Godesberg Program is misleading. One may view the democratic welfare state, which is called for in that program, as a historically necessary compromise in the medium term, but it should not be passed off as “socialism”, any more than “Swedish socialism” or “Arab socialism” goes beyond the ideological vocabulary of self-portrayal.’

Since the Godesberg Program set the course, Social Democratic economic and social policy has not been fundamentally different from that of the bourgeois parties. Although reformist concepts from the theoretical repository of socialist and philosophical traditions were discussed (the Bernstein Renaissance, critical rationalism, the double strategy of the Young Socialists), they did not find their way into practice. For the era of the Godesberg Program up to the planning euphoria of Social Democratic government policy, one could say that ‘the awareness of a crisis-prone capitalism, which tends to threaten democracy and political freedoms, was replaced by the idea of a technocratic model of a plannable capitalism under the term “modern industrial society”, which can both satisfy the interests of wage earners and facilitate political democracy.’ (Bergmann et al. 1975, 138)

This view of society common to ‘social-liberal integrative reformism’ (Fülberth/Harrer 1974, 17) differs from the socialist reformism represented, for instance, by Peter von Oertzen, who wants to achieve a different, socialist order through reforms that overcome the system. Admittedly, there has prevailed a ‘socialist image of Social Democracy’, as Willy Brandt pointedly called it: ‘While in earlier eras of the labour movement socialisation was the core vision of the future, today the guiding principle of Social Democratic reform policy is the expansion of welfare state interventions.’ (1986, 122) — Thus it is not surprising that in 1977 (HDS, 16) Social Democratic authors self-critically declared: ‘A consistent theory of DS […] does not yet exist.’

In the socialist parties of Northern Europe, the concept of ‘functional socialism’ was formulated. The best-known exponent of this position, G. Adler-Karlsson, argues that society does not need to be fully socialised; it is sufficient to socialise only some of the ownership functions. In Sweden, he says, ‘we have not had a total socialization of ownership, but instead a selective socialization of some of the most important functions inside the totality of functions which we call ownership. We have limited the rights of the owners of means of production to use their goods in an unsocial way’ (1969, 22). In an afterword to the German edition, however, Adler-Karlsson remarks with resignation: ‘It is not that I have found a system that works better in practice. Rather, it seems that functional socialism does not work either.’ (1973, 155)

In 1989, the Socialist International affirmed the conception of DS as the ‘democratisation on a global scale of economic, social and political power structures’ (SI 1989, §9) and stated, rather vaguely, with regard to the relationship between politics and economy: ‘social control of the economy is a goal that can be achieved through a wide range of economic means according to time and place’ (§60). Yet Adler-Karlsson wrote: ‘One of the most essential objections to reformism seems to me to be the fact that the private part of the economy, as long as it is allowed to exist, creates new problems faster than a socialist government can carry out the necessary reforms.’ (1973, 155 et sq.; see Israel 1974, 312)

In contrast to the northern and central European socialist and social democratic parties, which adhered to a gradualist transformation strategy, ‘the socialist economic strategy in the western European Mediterranean countries remained focused on a theory of rupture with capitalist logic. According to this theory, only after a legal socialisation of key industries, the establishment of a dominant public sector and binding state planning regulations can the alternative logic, which alone deserves the name socialist, come into effect’ (Grebing/Meyer 1992, 27). The French Socialist Party, for example, soon after taking over the government, instead of seizing social power, redefined the terms: ‘The implemented policy has so little to do with the announced programmatic concepts that French socialism was even forced to change the discourse. Up until 1981, the “socialist transformation of society” was the key concept. The central term used by French socialists today is “modernisation”, which neither comes from the socialist tradition nor denotes any specific socialist content.’ (Sotelo 1987, 454) — Whether the strategy of a ‘logic of rupture’ has been discredited by the failure of bureaucratic state socialism, as Thomas Meyer believes, seems at least questionable after the failure of social democratic reform models of governmental socialism.

Ossip K. Flechtheim criticised a social-democratic reading of ‘DS’, which for him is more or less a socially tinted neo-capitalism (1978, 248); in contrast, he argues for a ‘human-’ or ‘eco-socialism’ that ‘should continue the tradition of liberalism, radicalism (in the English sense of the word) and anarchism’ (249). As bearer of social change, he lists ‘liberal socialists and socialist pacifists, council communists and Trotskyists, reform communists and syndicalists, Christian socialists and libertarian anarchists’ (276). Flechtheim sees the basis for change in individual institutions in the superstructure, which are relatively autonomous: ‘Liberation in the “margins”, for example, beginning with the family, through school, art and science, jurisprudence, etc., could also help create a new type of human being who could then fight exploitation and oppression in politics and the economy more successfully and more consciously.’ (277) Similar to Herbert Marcuse (1970, 1972, 1974), Flechtheim centres his hopes on the subject of change in social movements, especially women and the intelligentsia.

What is required beyond the politically expressed attitude, however, is a change in the structure of needs and consumption among individuals (see F. O. Wolf 1991, 40-46), a change in the social consensus concerning the values functional for capitalism (competition, the meaning of life in the consumption of material goods, human behaviour determined by the pursuit of personal advantage) which would have to include the majority of workers as well as the socialist movement (v. Oertzen 1980, 91). Such a change would lead to a society with new needs: ‘These new needs would find their expression in radically altered human relations and in a radically different social and natural environment: solidarity instead of struggle, sensuality instead of repression; the disappearance of brutality, vulgarity and its language; and peace as a lasting state.’ (Marcuse 1971, 131)

Against a governmental understanding of socialism that sees the emancipation of the individual as merely derivative of structural changes of the state and economy, Oskar Negt has called for ‘developing a positive and offensive concept of socialist democratisation that not only reaches the minds of the people, but also their feelings, their fantasies of liberation, their immediate interests, and can thus be understood in all areas of society as a vivid alternative to the existing relations of domination.’ (1976, 462) Similar to Nikos Poulantzas (1980, 256), Negt — displaying an optimistic faith in participatory processes — rejects bureaucratised party and state apparatuses in favour of the concrete utopia of councils. Self-management is the organisational centre of socialist democracy; opposing centralisation, Negt insists on the ‘dialectic between centralised grassroots activities and central organisation’ (1976, 468).

Poulantzas refers to the social democratic and state-socialist tradition of statism ‘twin limits or dangers to be avoided’ (1980, 251) on the democratic road to socialism. Both factions of the divided labour movement are ‘characterized by basic distrust of direct, rank-and-file democracy and popular initiative’ (255). The counter-image to statolatry, to ‘state-worship’ (ibid.), exclusive direct democracy, however, threatens to lead to despotism or a dictatorship of experts: ‘The essential problem of the democratic road to socialism, of DS, must be posed in a different way: how is it possible radically to transform the State in such a manner that the extension and deepening of political freedoms and the institutions of representative democracy (which were also a conquest of the popular masses) are combined with the unfurling of forms of direct democracy and the mushrooming of self-management bodies’ (256).

Similarly to Negt and Flechtheim, Poulantzas sees the road to socialism in the development of ‘diffuse centers of resistance which the masses always possess within the state networks’ (258), in order to become the centre of real power at the state level. Long before socialist political goals can be generalised, according to Negt, local grassroots initiatives seek ‘a piece of individual emancipation’, for example in ecological conflicts, collective defence struggles against factory closures as well as struggles of young people for their own collective living space. These are expressions of resistance against the destruction of subjectivity. In the process, political civil liberties enter into the diversity of opinion of a ‘proletarian public sphere’, extending into socialist democracy.

With the dictum that socialist democratisation is ‘inseparably linked to the idea of self-management’, Negt (1976, 491) embraces libertarian anarchist traditions which were also revived in the new social movements: this line of reasoning certainly appears more auspicious than the now failed state socialism or the ‘business as usual’ of the social democratic welfare state from above. Bourgeois democracies replaced feudal society with a form of organisation that classifies humans hierarchically in a division of labour and class society (Treiber 1980; Lüscher 1988).

Given that socialism cannot be a simple takeover of the state apparatus and the economically concentrated apparatuses of power, but will only emerge when the masses are ready ‘to defend a broad base of self-governing organisations as their manifest alternative to the capitalist system of rule’ (Negt 1976, 490), the question of subjectivity and its cultural-revolutionary transformation must take centre stage (Bahro 1978). Not only has state socialism failed, but the governmental socialism of the social democratic and socialist parties is also in crisis, now that the ‘brief dream of everlasting prosperity’ (Lutz 1984) is over.

Thus, we may distinguish ‘between a state socialism that seeks to achieve its goals with the help of the organised power of the state, and a DS that will not tolerate any other form of realising its aims than direct action by the people’ (Sotelo 1987, 443). The ‘proletariat,’ the ‘people’ or ‘the masses’, of course, can no longer be substantialised as an acting subject: democracy and individual emancipation belong together (Negt 1990, 44).

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Robert Lederer

Translated by Jacob Blumenfeld

→ Anticipation, Basic Values, Bureaucracy, Democracy, Democracy/Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Ecosocialism, Emancipation, Ethical Socialism, Hegemony, Labour Movement, Mass Culture, Reform Communism, Reformism, Revolution, Social Democracy, Socialist Market Economy, Statism, Third Way, Working Class

→ Antizipation, Arbeiterbewegung, Arbeiterklasse, Bürokratie, Demokratie, Demokratie/Diktatur des Proletariats, Diktatur des Proletariats, Dritter Weg, Emanzipation, Etatismus, ethischer Sozialismus, Grundwerte, Hegemonie, Massenkultur, Ökosozialimus, Reformismus, Reformkommunismus, Revolution, Sozialdemokratie, sozialistische Marktwirtschaft