Why European Social Democracy Is In Danger Of Terminal Decline?
The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftungs’s Academy for Social Democracy explains: social democracy.
This is Juliane. She is a politics student. Together with her flatmate, Marco, she is talking about “social democracy”. Marco only had a rough idea about it until now.
Following liberalamerica.org – It is NOT:
- Democratic Socialism Is Not Marxism
- It Is Not Communism
- It Is Not A Replacement For Capitalism
- It Is Not The Same As Regular Socialism
- It Is Not Outside The Democratic Party
What is Social Democracy for YOU?
Social democracy is a government system that has similar values to socialism, but within a capitalist framework. The ideology, named from democracy where people have a say in government actions, supports a competitive economy with money while also helping people whose jobs don’t pay a lot.
Social democracy has often been seen as a pragmatic compromise between capitalism and socialism. This chapter shows that social democracy is in fact a distinctive body of political thought: an ideology which prescribes the use of democratic collective action to extend the principles of freedom and equality valued by democrats in the political sphere to the organization of the economy and society, chiefly by opposing the inequality and oppression created by laissez-faire capitalism. The chapter makes this case by examining three distinct eras in the development of social democratic ideas: the emergence of social democracy in the decades before the Second World War; the so-called ‘golden age’ of social democracy between 1945 and 1970; and the period of social democratic retreat from 1970 until the present.
The theory of social democracy mainly arose in central Europe and especially in Germany during the 19th century. During that time, Central Europe consisted of a strictly unjust society, with a rich upper class of industrialists and Noblemen on the one side and a huge labor force, which worked under harsh and brutal conditions, on the other. Supporters of the idea of a more equal society referred to various political theorists, such as Karl Marx (1818-1883), Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864), Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) amongst others. The umbrella term for all supporters of a more just and equal society was ‘socialists’.
