Communists and Social Democrats

Communism means a classless society evolved on the ruins of capitalism (which is based on capitalist exploitation of wage labour). This is to be achieved by intensification of class struggle to the point of abolition of the two poles of the antagonism — capital and wage labour. Whenever communists participate in institutions of bourgeois democracy — e.g., the parliament — they do it exclusively for this end and never for harmonising (the interests of the opposing classes.

By contrast social democrats take such institutions “as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty-bourgeoisie”. (From The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx)

In a word, communism is essentially revolutionary: its adherents value reforms basically as stepping stones to revolution. Social democrats are essentially class collaborationist and reformist: they advocate and work for reforms to prevent revolution.

They thus work for preserving the capitalist social order, albeit in a more democratic, more civilised shape. This is where their petty-bourgeois outlook converges with that of the more intelligent sections of the big bourgeoisie.

Thanks to this outlook and their stubborn struggle against revolutionary communists, social democrats earn the trust of the ruling bourgeoisie. In the face of crisis, the latter sometimes allows or even supports social democratic parties to form governments in the existing parliamentary system and act as crisis managers on their behalf. Such governments play this role through state welfarism (providing relief to the poor) and by persuading the exploiters and the exploited to agree to a set of compromises (in the name of industrial peace and development, national interest etc.) so that class conflicts are kept within bounds and a revolutionary conflagration is avoided. In the process, however, they get thoroughly embroiled in bourgeois parliamentarism and thus assimilated in the capitalist system itself, and acquire all the vices of this system such as corruption, anti-people bureaucratic attitude and so on. Such cases have been experienced in many a country; and also in our country at the state level.

To avoid confusion, it should be remembered that owing to peculiar historical circumstances, Russian communists used to call themselves Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. It was only after the revolution that the name of communist party was formally adopted. So in most writings of Lenin, “social democracy” is used in a positive sense, meaning communists.

Further Readings