page_title: Social democracy
section_title: Communist split and the Third Way
hierarchical_section_title: Social democracy / Overview / Philosophy / Communist split and the Third Way
caption_attribution_description: English: UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The photo contact sheet, identified as A9572 by the White House Photographic Office (WHPO), is housed at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, a branch of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
context_page_description: Social democracy is a political, social and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy. The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest and social-welfare provisions. Due to longstanding governance by social-democratic parties during the post-war consensus and their influence on socioeconomic policy in Northern and Western Europe, social democracy became associated with Keynesianism, the Nordic model, the social-liberal paradigm and welfare states within political circles in the late 20th century. It has been described as the most common form of Western or modern socialism as well as the reformist wing of democratic socialism.
context_section_description: Before social democracy was associated to a policy regime with a specific set of socioeconomic policies, its economics ranged from communism to syndicalism and the guild socialists, who rejected or were opposed to the approach of some Fabians, regarded as being "an excessively bureaucratic and insufficiently democratic prospect". Communists and revolutionary socialists were a significant part of social democracy and represented its revolutionary wing. Although they remained committed to the concept of social democracy representing the highest form of democracy, social democracy became associated with its reformist wing since the communist split starting in 1917.
  The Russian Revolution further exacerbated this division, resulting in a split between those supporting the October Revolution renaming themselves as Communist and those opposing the Bolshevik development (favouring the liberal social-democratic development as argued by the Mensheviks) remaining with the Social Democrat label. Rather than abandoning social democracy, Communists simply remained committed to revolutionary social democracy, merging into communism. However, they saw Social Democrat associated to reformism, found it irredeemably lost and chose Communist to represent their views. For the Communists, the Social Democrats betrayed the world's working class by supporting the imperialist Great War and leading their national governments into the war. The Communists also criticized their reformism, arguing that it represented "reformism without reforms". This reformist–revolutionary division culminated in the German Revolution of 1919 in which the Communists wanted to overthrow the German government to turn it into a soviet republic like it was done in Russia while the Social Democrats wanted to preserve it as what came to be known as the Weimar Republic. It was those revolutions that essentially transformed the social democracy meaning from "Marxist revolutionary" into a form of "moderate parliamentary socialism".
  While evolutionary and reformist social democrats believe that capitalism can be reformed into socialism, revolutionary social democrats argue that this is not possible and that a social revolution would still be necessary. The revolutionary criticism of reformism, but not necessarily of reforms which are part of the class struggle, goes back to Marx, who proclaimed that social democrats had to support the bourgeoisie wherever it acted as a revolutionary, progressive class because "bourgeois liberties had first to be conquered and then criticised". Internal rivalry in the social-democratic movement within the Second International between reformists and revolutionaries resulted in the Communists led by the Bolsheviks founding their own separate Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 that sought to rally revolutionary social democrats together for socialist revolution. With this split, the social-democratic movement was now dominated by reformists, who founded the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) in 1923. The LSI had a history of rivalry with the Comintern, with which it competed over the leadership of the international socialist and labour movement.
  The social-democratic Gaitskellites emphasized the goals of personal liberty, social welfare and above all social equality. The Gaitskellites were part of a political consensus between the British Labour and Conservative parties, famously dubbed Butskellism. Some social-democratic Third Way figures such as Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair, who has described himself as a Christian socialist and consider himself to be a socialist in ethical terms, adamantly insist that they are socialists, for they claim to believe in the same values that their anti-Third Way critics do. However, Clause IV's open advocacy of state socialism was alienating potential middle-class Labour supporters and nationalization policies had been so thoroughly attacked by neoliberal economists and politicians, including rhetorical comparisons by the right of state-owned industry in the West to that in the Soviet Union and th
caption: Anthony Crosland, who argued that traditional capitalism had been reformed and modified almost out of existence by the social-democratic welfare policy regime after World War II
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