social democracy as a historical phenomenon, adam przeworski
(28): goal is to chart a course btw the two 'reefs', Rosa Luxemburg--abandoning the 'mass character ' of the movement, or abandoning the final goals of the movement
(29): three 'effects' of the bourgeois State on the workers' movement
- individualization--each person is a citizen, not a worker
- representation--relations within a class become relations of representation [how is this specific to the bourgeois State?]
- organization and embourgeoisement (i.e., Robert Michels)
(30): universal suffrage changes the context--now, parties have to decide between a 'legal' road, and an 'extra-parliamentary one' [this has to be rough, of course--SPD chose legal road before full universal suffrage, no?]
(31): key--the normal conditions in which you build socialist organizations doesn't prepare you to be the kind of movement that is likely to seize power (SPD is case in point)
(33): for a long time, Social Democracy understood universal suffrage as the means to the final goal--"seemed to guarantee socialist victory"
(36): Bebel at Erfurt--'most in the room will live to see the day' [!]
(38): illusory myth of the proletarian majority
(39): and, what follows, the impossibility of winning elections if you're a party endeavouring to represent the interests of one clas,s as class
(39): most starkly--"socialists must choose between a party homogenous in its class appeal, but sentenced to perpetual electoral defeats, and a party that struggles for electoral success at the cost of diluting its class character."
(40): thus, to participate in elections means that the task of emancipating the working-class can no longer be the task of workers themselves.
(40): cf. Engels advice to recruit the small peasantry
(42): moreover, social democratic parties have never obtained the votes even of those they've claimed to represent (significant fractions of workers have gone elsewhere).
(43): SD parties have found it necessary to appeal to workers as individuals, not as class (as the poor, etc.)
(47-48): imp--when they found themselves in power in the interwar period, they were unable to make inroads--private property was intact [he gives two reasons: (a) lack of a coherent program; (b) didn't have the parliamentary support sufficient to do this
(50): maximalist vs. minimalist debate--be revolutionary, and people will flock (Norway in 1928, people fled government fell) vs. protect welfare, set the stage for later transformation (but no economic program of their own, until the depression, when they became adept at 'administering' capitalist economies) [the causal argument is a bit confused here, let's sort it out--what is the source of their degeneration? ideas? lack of balance of forces in favour? lack of parliamentary support?]
(52): Keynesianism didn't need nationalization
(54): and soon, Social Democracy ceased to be a 'reformist' movement, in the classical sense. this "is a direct consequence of those reforms that have been accomplished
(55-56): pithy version of theory of the State--unless you nationalize, you can't escape the dependence of your economy on the profitability of private intereprise ('business confidence')
(56): ultimately, key claim is that this is the source of SD treachery--"nationalization of the means of production has turned out to be electorally unfeasible; radical redistributive policies result in economic crises... and general affluence can be increased only if capitalists are made to cooperate..."
(58): within capitalism, you cannot have a socio-economic revolution without precipitating an economic crisis (sorry Leon Blum)
