We have to divide the social democratic movement into prewar and postwar. And by war, I mean World War II, not World War I. I think, in the prewar period, that is, the social democratic movement of the first half of the twentieth century, there was a very robust understanding of the bourgeois state and the limits it puts on the chances for progressive change and progressive legislation.
It was not the kind of theory you see written in academic texts today, or since the 1980s and ’90s, when Marxists developed what we call modern state theory. But modern state theory — as developed by people like Nicos Poulantzas, Ralph Miliband, Fred Block, and Claus Offe — really built on the insights or the assertions that early twentieth century social democrats made, assertions which were very sharp and very smart, but weren’t articulated into a full theory.
The early social democrats didn’t see any contradiction between fighting for reforms at that moment and also trying to wage a revolution.
What the Left did in the latter part of the twentieth century was turn those earlier assertions and affirmations into a theory, making explicit what was implicit.
What was implicit in the early parts of the twentieth century among social democrats was the understanding that the state — even a democratic state, which was in some way beholden to the voters, most of whom were workers — gave greater power to capitalists, even though workers had greater votes. That was essential to their understanding.
This is not as well encapsulated in Lenin’s State and Revolution, but the State and Revolution is not a representative text of how social democrats thought about the state. That book was forced down the throat of the global left because when the Bolshevik party became the most important and most famous communist party in the world, it became kind of a religious text. But it doesn’t express the entirety of what social democrats thought because its own theory of…
Auteur: Vivek Chibber
