Keynes famously remarked that practical political men, whether they be
cautious or bold, found themselves unconsciously repeating the ideas of long
dead economists. Politicians who advance neo-liberalism are, whether they
know it or not, repeating the ideas of the reactionary Austrian economists
Mises and Hayek. Socialist politicians purvey, in simplified form, the ideas
of long dead Germanic Social Democratic economists such as Kautsky,
Bernstein and Bauer.
1 Background
Historically, the dominant perspective on socialism has been that developed
in the German Social Democratic Party in the years before the first world
war. The SPD was the strongest and most influential party in the Socialist
International and its ideas influenced other parties, including both the
British Labour Party1 and the European Communist Parties. Lih2[3] has
shown the extent to which the Leninism to which the latter subscribed was
in fact just a re-labeling of classical German Social Democracy. We are used
to see Social Democracy and Communism as very different, but the original
distinguishing feature of Communism – that it sought power by preparing
armed insurrection, was long ago abandoned by most communist political
parties. This original communist principle has been retained only by Maoist
parties in Asia and South America, all other left wing parties are in this sense
Social Democrats.
When we use the word Social Democratic therefore we are refering to
a tradition which existed prior to 1914. In the 1950s the original German
Social Democrats abandoned their commitment to public ownership of the
means of production, after which the term Social Democrat changed its
popular meaning, and came to indicate a tendancy somewhere to the right
of socialism. Socialists in the Labour Party in Britain and the Socialist Party
in France counterposed themselves to this later meaning Social Democracy
from the 1960s. We would argue however that so long as the Labour Party
retiained its 1918 programatic commitment:
1
2
2
We would argue that by the mid 1950s the British Labour Party was more
classically Social Democratic than the then SPD.
We elaborate on this in our book [1, 2].
Paul Cockshott, Allin Cottrell, Heinz Dieterich