Social democracy is a label used to indicate a reformist and non-Marxist left-of-centre party, one which differs from moderate conservatism only in relatively marginal ways. A typical social democrat party, for example, will probably espouse some degree of nationalization, but do so more in terms of the capacity for organized planning of the economy, or the guaranteed production of public utilities, than from any theoretical opposition to private property per se. Again, a social democrat party is likely to opt for higher and more proportional direct taxation, and for taxes on industry and commerce, on the grounds of social justice. Such a party will, in general, seek some redistribution of wealth, especially through an organized welfare state, but will not make equality a primary goal in its own right. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the French Parti Socialiste are all social democrat parties, whether or not the words appear in their titles.
The British Labour Party, was formerly social democrat, but since the rise to power of Tony Blair and his reformists who re-branded the party ‘New Labour’, it is difficult to claim that the label is still valid. The other parties mentioned have either begun, or appear likely to begin, to move the same way as an international consensus forms around the commitment to a more laissez-faire economic policy and a monetarist fiscal policy.
The prototypes, or paradigms, of social democracy are the more or less identical and so-named social democrat parties of the Scandinavian countries, which presided over a mixed (that is, capitalist but partly nationalized and highly planned) economy, and a tax-expensive welfare state, for most of the period between the end of the First World War and the early 1970s and, in the case of Sweden into the 1990s . Occasionally, as in the German constitution (Grundgesetz—the Basic Law), the phrase ‘social democracy’ is used to identify an entire system of government. If this usage means anything at all, it is a combination of the political theory concept of a liberal democracy combined with some general sense of a semi-legal right to the protection of a welfare state. In most cases where a party actually calls itself ‘social democrat’, the explicit use of the title is an attempt to establish a special identity to a more right-wing version of what is in fact a generally unrevolutionary and unradical form of socialism, and does not usually connote any specific theoretical or ideological position.
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