2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: "Everyone now is more or less a Socialist" [View all]VanillaRhapsody
(21,115 posts)Social democracy is a political ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a capitalist economy, and a policy regime involving welfare state provisions, collective bargaining arrangements, regulation of the economy in the general interest, redistribution of income and wealth, and a commitment to representative democracy.[1][2][3] Social democracy thus aims to create the conditions for capitalism to lead to greater egalitarian, democratic and solidaristic outcomes, and is often associated with the set of socioeconomic policies that became prominent in Western and Northern Europe particularly the Nordic model in the Nordic countries during the latter half of the 20th century.[4][5][6]
Social democracy originated as a political ideology that advocated a peaceful, evolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism using established political processes, in contrast to the revolutionary approach to transition associated with Orthodox Marxism.[7] However, in the post-war era, contemporary social democracy separated from the socialist movement altogether and emerged as a distinct political identity that advocated reforming rather than replacing capitalism.[8] In this period, social democrats embraced a mixed economy based on the predominance of private property, with only a minority of essential utilities and public services under public ownership. As a result, social democracy became associated with Keynesian economics, state interventionism, and the welfare state, while abandoning the prior goal of abolishing the capitalist system and substituting it for a qualitatively different socialist economic system.[9][10][11]