In 1883, social democrats were described as socialism's most extreme wing
In 1883 Richard Ely, in one of the first studies of European socialism written for Americans, portrayed social democrats as the radical fringe, so fixated on equal enjoyment regardless of work that communists might be a better name. Today the label signals a moderate, centre-left defender of the welfare state.
In the nineteenth century social democrat was a broad umbrella for socialists who followed Ferdinand Lassalle or Karl Marx rather than utopian schemes, covering both revolutionary and non-revolutionary currents but excluding anarchists. Parties across Europe used it: the German groups that merged into the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Britain's Social Democratic Federation and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The break came with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, after which communist became the label for revolutionaries and social democracy came to mean reformists opposed to both revolution and Soviet authoritarianism.
Even then, many social democrats still named the eventual end of capitalism as a goal. By the 1990s most had accepted mixed economies dominated by private property, aiming to regulate capitalism rather than replace it. In the twentieth century the term became linked with two national models: German revisionist Marxism and the Swedish drive for a comprehensive welfare state. Today it is often used almost interchangeably with the Nordic model of welfare combined with corporatist collective bargaining, and associated with Keynesian economics.
As a programme, social democracy favours representative democracy, redistribution of income, regulation in the public interest, and universal services such as child care, education, elder care, health care and workers' compensation. It has deep ties to trade unions and supports collective bargaining and workers' co-determination rights. Conservatives and liberals have accepted welfare states too, but socialists tend to see them as a foundation for emancipation rather than a mere safety net.
The 1990s brought the Third Way, an attempt to fuse social democratic values with economic liberalism, taken up in America by Bill Clinton's New Democrats and in Britain by Tony Blair's New Labour, though critics call it neoliberal. In twenty-first-century Europe, most social democratic parties sit in the Party of European Socialists on the centre-left, while democratic socialist parties stand further left.
Source: Social democracy
