Will the government of Gabriel Boric be social democratic?, is the program of Apruebo Dignidad social democratic? This question has crossed the election campaign and remains open amid countless conceptual confusions. For some people being a social democrat is the worst of insults and for others the greatest of flattery. And both could be in the same party. Even Joaquín Lavín declared himself at some point “social democratic”, showing the elasticity of a concept that can be used for everything. In Chile, this notion can be used for the most dissimilar purposes. Some think that social democracy is the same as social-liberalism. The far right believes that social democracy is a soft form of communism and the far left a (futile) attempt to humanize capitalism. At the same time, there are those who associate social democracy with any redistributive or political attempt at the welfare state, without regard to democratic or institutional factors, and in other cases, with a vague type of cultural or social progressivism.
The root of this confusion lies not only in the opportunism of those who manipulate this idea. At present it is difficult to arrive at both an empirical and normative definition of social democracy, due to the evolution that this category has acquired over time. That is why it is good to remember that the first social democratic party was founded in 1863 by Ferdinand Lasalle in Germany, under the name of General Workers’ Association, changing in 1875 to the Socialist Workers’ Party and taking in 1890 the current name: Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In this party Marx and Engels actively militarized, despite their criticism of the program sanctioned at the Gotha Congress in 1875. In 1891 the SPD assumed the Erfurt Programme, in several respects more radical and concrete than the previous one, under the leadership of Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein and August Bebel, who represented three internal tendencies of European social democracy, prior to the First World War. At that stage social democracy was a broad movement, based on workers’ and trade union culture, ranging from gently reformist academics and professionals, to revolutionaries like Lenin. Everyone agreed on the construction of a mass party, capable of organizing the workers, which could lead all the oppressed in the class struggle and in the struggle for democracy, to produce a revolutionary break with capitalism and lay the foundations of a socialist society. The pace of this transition was unclear, and there might be positions that sought to accelerate this process (Rosa Luxemburg) or some that wished to go very slowly (Eduard Bernstein), but until 1914 this was the social democratic “orthodoxy”.
The beginning of the First World War is a political and theoretical failure of this project. The Second International breaks down, as a result of armed confrontation, and the successes achieved since 1875 seem lost. In 1917 the Russian Social Democracy adopted a revolutionary strategy, within the framework of the collapse of the Tsarist empire. The birth of the USSR further divides the social democratic parties, which live in each country internal breakdowns for or against the new strategy initiated in Moscow. At that time the communist parties were born, in general as splits within social democracy, which quickly came into conflict with their former parties of origin.
The Social Democrats between 1917 and 1945 had dissimilar developments in Europe, participating in coalition governments in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, Denmark, Spain and ruling Sweden since 1932, as the majority party. At the end of the Second World War, a debate began to take shape over the so-called “second revisionism”, which has continued to this day. The SPD took over Godesberg’s program in 1959, strongly motivated by the electoral and political need to mark deep distances with the GDR. In the midst of the Cold War, German Social Democracy tried to distance itself from its Marxist origin, renouncing to proclaim “ultimate truths” linked to some philosophy of history. Socialism was redefined procedurally, as a set of basic values, ceasing to be the ultimate goal of historical developments, to be understood as the constant and endless task of “fighting for freedom and justice, preserving them and testing themselves in them”. In this way, German Social Democracy accepted private property.a and the market economy, but under the principle of “competition as far as possible, planning as necessary”.
This reconfiguration of the European social democratic tradition has had many cycles, which have made it move to the right and to the left in certain circumstances. During the seventies, the governments of Willy Brandt in Germany, Olof Palme in Sweden, Joop den Uyl in the Netherlands managed to consolidate very advanced models of welfare states, with democratic processes that incorporated practices that today would be radical, such as the participation of workers in the boards of large private companies. In southern Europe, the communist parties of Italy, France and Spain simultaneously adopted the “Eurocommunist” theses, which in practice meant their conversion into social democratic parties.
The election of François Mitterrand in France (1981) and Felipe González in Spain (1982) represented the moment of greatest expansion of European social democracy, but at the same time, the beginning of a crisis that continues to this day. The favorable winds that had accompanied the construction of welfare states gave way to the neoliberal wave driven by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The PSOE and the PSF had to morigerate their programs and adapt them to a privatization cycle that was imposed around the world. In the nineties, this process became even more acute. The triumphs of Tony Blair in the United Kingdom (1997) and Gerard Schröder in Germany (1998) marked a profound change in the nature of social democracy. In the case of Schröder, this shift materialized in the so-called “Agenda 2010”, whose objective was to reduce the cost in the German social model and promote productivity. In the English case, Blair proposed his “Third Way”, a rightly social-liberal program, designed by Anthony Giddens. With the argument of making sustainable the basic elements of the Welfare State in the era of globalization, these programs assumed that macroeconomic stability should be favored at all costs and dismantle what they called “paternalistic policies” such as the bargaining power of unions, the protection of national industries, promoting the privatization or concession of state enterprises.
Schröder’s Agenda 2010 and Blair’s Third Way have been the subject of deep criticism and controversy in social democracy, pointing out that these programmes lacked a critical analysis of society and the state. They are accused of turning a short-term response to the difficulties of public financing into a deliberate abandonment of the objectives, strategies and tactics of the social democratic parties. This criticism was developed by leaders who split to the left, such as Oskar Lafontaine and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. But also within the parties themselves, like Jeremy Corbyn in British Labour. At present there is an abandonment of social-liberal positions, which is evidenced in the program emanating from the last SpD Congress held in Berlin in 2019, where the “Jusos”, the young social democrats, promoted a return to socialist identity, which was fundamental to arrive at the current government of Olaf Scholz. The same can be seen in Spain, where the PSOE governs in coalition with Podemos and the processes of parliamentary support for the Socialist government by the left parties in Portugal.
Is social democracy possible in Chile?
This historical journey allows us to ask about the possibility of a social democratic project in Chile. The Socialist Party of Chile was born in 1933 with a clear influence of the Erfurt Program, as far as the idea of a mass party, with workers’ roots, is concerned. The problem, which arose from that very origin, lay in the weakness of the Chilean economy, still strongly agrarian, with a very weak and unskilled industrial business, and an insufficiently solid and democratic State. For this reason, Chilean socialism has always had the need to consider itself creatively, adapting the general ideas of socialism to the local context. This is what the “Theoretical Foundation of the Program of the Socialist Party” of 1947 affirmed, which denotes the authorship of Eugenio González Rojas: “The socialist doctrine is not a set of static dogmas, but a living, essentially dynamic conception, which expresses in the order of political ideas the creative tendencies of the modern proletariat.” Hence, it is stated that “Socialism is, in its essence, humanism”, and that “the Socialist Party fights for a peaceful and democratic international coexistence, alien to all forms of imperialist pressure and opposed to the existence of dictatorial and totalitarian regimes”.
For this reason, the prThe socialist program of 1947 dialogues with all the programmatic and strategic elements of a European social democratic project, but adapted and inculturated to the Latin American context. The differentiating element of the Chilean PS is its policy of alliances, which will be defined since 1952 around the “Workers’ Front”, promoted in particular by Raúl Ampuero, and which implied a strategic alliance with the Communist Party and, implicitly, an exclusion of centrist forces such as the Christian Democracy and the Radical Party. Paradoxically, the Communist Party held a much broader policy of alliances, under the idea of the “National Liberation Front”, which proposed a coalition of all progressive sectors regardless of their class, ideology, religion. This paradox is very special, since the PS supported a program of reforms, relatively moderate, but on the basis of a “classist”, revolutionary or radicalized alliance. On the other hand, the CP, being more radical in its program, proposed a much more gradualist and moderate strategy. The paradox is that the strategic line of the CP, the “National Liberation Front”, was more suited to a reformist or democratic socialist vision than the more “classist” line of the “Workers’ Front” promoted by the PS. It is not surprising that during the UP government the PC became allende’s anchor party and the PS, the fractious partner of the coalition.
The hypothesis of an alliance of the PS with the PC was seen with strangeness from the outside, since under the logic of Godesberg’s program this type of collaboration would be impossible, since the reciprocal veto prevailed, typical of the Cold War. To understand the formation of the FRAP in 1956 and then the UP in 1969, it was necessary to assume the influence of the Cuban revolution as well as the process of the Christian Democratic “revolution in freedom”. Both events contributed to changing the ideological, political and strategic definitions in both the PS and the PC, which determined the need for their confluence. Therefore, the formation of the UP was not easy or spontaneous. It was a long debate that had at its center the criticism of the eminently electoral character of the left, especially after the 1964 election.
Another factor that facilitated this confluence was the “Non-Aligned” movement. The existence of this broad, and somewhat ambiguous, field of countries resisting the bloc policy of the Cold War made it possible to provide a temporary solution to the deep differences between socialists and communists in international politics. The existence of the Non-Aligneds meant recognizing a camp of dependent, undeveloped countries that refused to submit to the orthodoxy of Moscow and that of European social democracy. His thesis lay in the possibility of a Latin American socialism, or African or Asian, not determined by normative criteria imposed from the first or second developed world.
In this way, the UP program suspended sine die the definitive judgment regarding a precise model of socialism, in view of developing a much more immediate task, of an “anti-oligarchic, anti-imperialist and anti-monopolistic” character. These are objectives that sought the conditions for the future development of the country and the emancipation of the social sectors less integrated into modernity: agrarian reform together with the nationalization of copper and large mining. This program was neither communist, nor socialist, nor social democratic. Strictly speaking, it was a developmentalist and proto-socialist program only in relation to the type of development that was desired to be generated in the future, after these structural reforms were concluded.
For this reason, the Popular Unity government cannot be defined as social democratic, since it assumed a framework of alliances and strategic and ideological considerations that does not fit into that definition. The UP must be characterized as a transformative, progressive and democratizing project, which sought to create the necessary conditions, prior to a welfare state, and a democratic socialism adapted to Latin American circumstances, in the context of a highly dependent country, which required going through an earlier phase, which would allow generating the economic and institutional conditions that would guarantee its viability. The socialism sought in the long term by Salvador Allende was not contradictory to what Harold Wilson or Willy Brandt proposed in 1970, but it differed in temporality and strategy, since the conditions of Latin America imposed a very different program and alliances.
Social democracy blocked
The coup d’état and the imposition of the constitutional regime of 1980 represent an early closure of any attempt to advance a program so.cialdemocratic in Chile. The entire neutralizing mechanism of the Constitution and its institutional mechanisms was designed to prevent the construction of a social state based on the rule of law and to maintain the subsidiary, privatizing and minimum state model. In this context, it is not surprising that the only alternative programme that has been carried out since 1990 has been of a social-liberal nature, along the lines of Blair and Schröder. The Concertación/Nueva Mayoría was consistent in assuming this paradigm and applying an appropriate strategy to this diagnosis. Some leaders did it in disgust, others with pleasure, but it cannot be denied that this was the policy developed, and that within the framework of the current Constitution it was the only possible model.
The balance of social-liberal policies is contradictory. In his defense it is argued that the traditional social democratic recipes (rising taxes and progressive redistribution, subsidies, defense of the income of groups condemned to economic marginalization) became unviable throughout the world as a result of the crisis of the Welfare State generated by globalization. But Giddens goes much further when he argues that “supporters of the third way must accept some of the criticisms that the right has made against the welfare state. It is an undemocratic state, since it depends on a vertical distribution, or from top to bottom, of subsidies. Its purpose is to protect and care, granting little margin to personal freedom. Many of its institutions are bureaucratized, alienating and inefficient, and often induce perverse effects that nullify the objectives that were intended to be achieved…” (Anthony Giddens, 1998). This type of argument, which disqualifies the welfare state as undemocratic, is very difficult to reconcile with a minimally social democratic approach. Giddens began by appealing to the financial sustainability of the welfare state, but ended up delegitimizing what he was supposed to protect and make viable.
In Chile it is possible to notice a similar process, to the extent that not only the viability of a welfare state project was limited as a result of the constitutional closures that built a blocked society, which ended up exploding in the outbreak of 2019. The same social-liberal mentality of Giddens was also incubated in a part of the Concertación, which does not constitute an extension, or to be more exact, a plausible reworking, of classical social democracy. This is the stumbling block that today is expressed in the obvious difficulty in building a parliamentary coalition between Apruebo Dignidad and an important part of the former Concertación, which is periodically responsible for reminding us that it has inoculated a form of shameful Thatcherism, which through acts of sleight of hand, adorned with feathers and socializing rhetoric, hidden that has turned the conservatives into their best references.
Having made this clarification, is I approve dignity a democratic socialist project? The question presupposes knowing what socialism is factually and normatively. There is no doubt that AD is a conglomerate of proven democratic convictions. What remains to be answered is what socialism can mean today for AD, beyond the generalities referring to the value of the collective, the Welfare State, the need for public investment, progressive taxes and national economies. It is likely that AD has more clarity regarding the feminist and ecological character of its project, than the socialist sense of its action, which is positive in that it forces the entire strategic perspective to be intersectionally complex.
In the years of the UP the question was different. Allendism, as a Chilean road to socialism, had to deal with the great problem of achieving that goal while maintaining respect for the rules of democracy. So, everyone knew or took for granted what socialism was. Today no one doubts the rules of democracy, but there is no clarity about what we call socialism. And the question remains as to how to reconcile the capitalism in which we live, and from which we will not be able to get out either by decree or by constitutional sanction, and a form of socialism that is worthy of the name.
Perhaps the question of the social democratic character of Apruebo Dignidad should be more modest and focus on the way in which this coalition moves away from the social-liberal policies that have been implemented since the nineties, and begins to create the institutional conditions of asymptotic approach to a future of relative egalitarianism in the economic and individual emancipation in the social. The new Constitution should create the conditions for a socialist hypothesis (still to be developed) to be deployed democratically in Chile, without institutional blockades.arbitrary ales, nor unjustified political closures. I believe that with the achievement of that goal we could be satisfied at this stage of history.
The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
