Spineless, unprincipled, constantly making excuses about why they're not doing anything, unwilling to do literally fucking ANYTHING to help the people they say they represent.
What are the underlying material conditions driving this?
Here in BC, Canada, the "social democratic" NDP government recently got a majority government, which means they can do literally anything they want. Pass any legislation they want. Pass any laws, any taxes, literally whatever the fuck they want.
And what have they done? FUCK ALL. Nothing. Not a single piece of legislation that I can think of. They're taking as long as they possibly can to implement $15 minimum wage, no paid sick days, no card check legislation, fucking NOTHING. Instead of using the pandemic as the obvious reason to pass this legislation they are hiding behind it as their excuse to avoid doing literally anything useful.
This seems to be the case all over the Western world.
WHY?
The collapse of the Soviet Union allowed them to go back to what they always were inside.
Because despite what social Democrats believe, capitalism can't be made humane. They are ultimately subjugated to capital's will sooner or later
Well sure, but the BC NDP government of the 1970's passed on average one piece of legislation every three days. The BC NDP of today can't be bothered to put a single fucking bill up for a vote. What has changed? Obviously the labour movement is a lot weaker now, but what else?
This is it. The answer. Social Democratic gains in the last century cannot be replicated in this one because we're missing both the Soviet Union and the feeling among the bourgeoisie of that era. They were living in a time where many of them had witnessed with terror the birth of the Soviet Union, the explosion of trade union movements throughout the industrialized world, demands for safety and conditions that were swiftly met. The capitalists were on guard, on the back foot, this communism thing was new and scary, they hadn't figured out how to deal with it yet so they made deals with the workers, appeasement. Also the world after the second world war was for the US and Europe a lot different. A lot of value had been destroyed in the war, there was massive room for growth and high profits, so it mattered less. They've since squeezed out all that growth and are now desperately cutting at things to get more growth because you have to have growth for capitalism. Unless an alien salesperson comes along, sells the capitalists a wormhole to a new world of resources and intelligent beings that can be easily subjugated by our militaries to give them another frontier for expansion and money to bribe the folks at home you're not going to see a return to that. Maybe if there was some massive die-off of humanity as a result of a very deadly plague or nuclear or conventional war that destroyed enough capital it might be able to restart the cycle a bit but none of these things are super likely.
Even if we did experience similar conditions for growth I doubt they'd be as willing to share. They have better tools, a century of experience and refinement for controlling the proles and are cocky because they consider themselves to have won the war against communism with the collapse of the USSR. To say nothing of the mass rejection of Marxism in the west thanks to propaganda which further puts them at ease. They can ignore social democrats/dem-socs all day in the imperial core.
Well its a mixed bag. Certainly, there is a supplantation of mass democracy. Politicians largely abandoned the idea of actually changing the world in the 1990s and turned over their authority to non-majoritarian institutions, like finance, the EU and IMF. There is a belief, I think, stemming from fear of radical movements of the 1960s mixed with the crises of the 1970s and 1980s that convinced politicians that the world was too interconnected and complicated to be managed through party platforms and elections every 4 years or so.
At the same time, there is a paralysis, because even when radicals rise to power, they realize that they actually have little power to change anything anyway, due to the dissolution of organized labor and mass political participation.
A lot that's wrong with Social-Democratic Parties is found in this Bernstein quote
The Final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything.
From a point of view where the only thing that matters is for your party to win elections, it becomes easy to justify abandoning any platform which makes it hard to do so (ie: policies those that are in direct opposition to the Bourgeois) and clearly the BCNDP cares more for keeping their majority then with doing anything with it.
Bill Clinton and one of his advisors had a conversation about this when they were down in polls before the reelection, and decided to break with the succdem-ish politics.
"What's the point of getting reelected if you have no mandate to do anything when you're reelected?"
Bill: "What's the point of having a mandate if you can't get reelected? Isn't the ultimate goal getting reelected?"
https://youtu.be/VouaAz5mQAs?t=2442
All the European socdem parties trace their lineage to the opportunist right wing of the 2nd International, the side that chose social chauvinism over international solidarity in 1914 and proved Lenin right repeatedly by doubling and then tripling down on this betrayal of the working class.
Lenin has an edgy screed on it at the time, as ever https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x02.htm But unless you have knowledge of the (mostly forgotten) key players in Socialism at the time it won't make a lot of sense.
Jacobin, surprisingly, has an ok review https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/second-international-bernstein-rosa-luxemburg-unions-world-war
half of State and Revolution is about this, but in the context of the time, so not that relevant anymore. Still a good read!
Also Lenin shits on contemporary succdems a lot for the same reasons in State and Revolution, though you may have already read that since pretty much every tendency on this site tells you to read it.
If you haven't...set aside some time to read it, slowly and carefully. Take notes. :lenin-shining:
What everyone else said and also the threat of the Soviet Union isn't at their backs.
"If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media - having tasted blood - would demand next that it expelled all its Socialist and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed of the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.”
- Tony Benn, 1982
Not about the NDP specifically, but there's this essay about Labour in the UK. I'd say the same applies to pretty much all socdem parties right now.
tldr - the socdem parties in the past decade have tried to create a 'big tent' of sorts comprised of both, college educated young 'radicals' and the older, more numerous and poorer factory workers. But there isn't any genuine solidarity between these two groups because, unlike in the past, there isn't any socialist underpinnings to their ideology. Most of the young 'radicals' only want to become a part of the petite bourgeoisie and would gladly jump ship to the liberals as soon as they start making some money. And most of the poorer working class have been filled with hatred for 'liberals', socialists, minorities, muslims, lgbtq+ etc by decades of conservative brainwashing. So the socdem parties can't offer any genuine economic change nor genuine social change - only mild reforms and the appearance of change which just delays the inevitable (if that).
Truth is they don’t have hard underlying support, which will drag them and discard them, because unions either collapsed or also integrated into the system. If they lose, they still get paid, take potshots at %insert party here% and hope to get elected next time.
Materially what benefit do they have to push anti capitalist policies, they won’t get consultancy gigs then later. So no losses, pure profits in selling out.
Unlike other people here I don't think it's because of sinister reasons. Politics everywhere has become a lot more about aesthetics than platforms. People are being taught from childhood that any change is bad and scary. In a lot of places the political theory that is taught is also absolutely pointless neoliberalism. A lot of, lot of people sincerely believe in deregulation and free markets. Finally there is just the fear of using power and not knowing how to do it. Also things are very different country by country and in Europe it is better, and there are policies being passed and there is competition and pressure from the left.
Another explanation is what I see in Eastern Europe - the social democrats don't get anything done, but neither does anybody else except the far right nationalists, cause for everyone except them it's a grift. For the nationalists it's a mix of grifting and actual conviction. And of course there is no meaningful left in most of Eastern Europe
It is so sad that the only ones in bourgeois politics who actually seems to believe in something and have a vision for a different society are the far right. Everyone else seems content with rearranging the deck chairs of the status quo.
The far right's leaders went to the same universities that leaders of other parties went to and they have similarly secure and privileged positions in society. Their folksiness is nothing but a bit to make their supporters (who they barely manage to hide their contempt for) identify with them.
I'm listening to the Radio War Nerd episodes on Yeltsin dissolving parliament in 1993, and Ames said that the leader of the surviving Communist Party (Gennady Zyuganov) in the 1996 election basically backed off entirely in 1996 in a rigged election, and that the dude is just controlled opposition. 99% of the elected 'left' are the same, just keeping the seat warm until their dads and moms, backed by capitalists, assume power and further entrench wealth.
Look at Sanders - he confirmed Neera. He had the power to say 'No', he didn't and I'm sure his rationale is 'We have bigger problems, I'm a realist' but that's a complete betrayal of his ideology. Even if they have good intentions, all these people are co-opted by the system.
Since nobody has said it, I feel it is important to add that these parties still act at the behest of their country's imperial overlords in the USA. Almost the entire world's financial industry operates on the US dollar. It doesn't matter which party wins in the imperial periphery (including the 'western' states which are dominated by US finance capital) because the US has a vice on their economy and so they will act in the interests of US capital. Like all aspects of capitalism, it isn't really a conspiracy as much as it is self selected, and the vice is tighter on non-western countries. Only the organized working classes in any given country can threaten a social democratic party more than US finance capital can. Only then will a social democratic party actually do social democracy.
Because, in a shocking twist, people with power decided to use that power to ensure that they would stay in power.
They always have been
They preach a revisionist role on the state: that the working class can control the State by electing a majority in parliament
This denial of the Marxian understanding that the State is an instrument of class rule to oppress one class over another is at the root of social-democracy being the "enemy within"
There is no depth to which Social Democrats wont sink. There is no firm "bottom" where they will stop. Hungary was a fascist nation for 12 years prior to ww2 which was only more influenced by Nazism as time went on
The Social-democratic party there completely capitulated to Horthy fascism and wasnt even banned during this period. Writing pro government periodicals and the like
They had the Soviet Union to worry about, and also they had to represent labor unions. Now there is no Soviet Union and there are no labor unions.
Additionally, there was a time when capital actually believed Keynsian economics was good for them, and thus Keynsian policies were easier to implement. Now they've fully moved to neoclassical economics.
