Reform or Revolution:
The Rise and Fall of Social Democracy
Socialism 2014
June 26, 2014
With Phil Gasper
The debate between reformists and revolutionaries is about how socialism can be achieved and what sort of socialism we want to build. Social democratic political parties like Germany’s SDP and Britain’s Labour Party once maintained that socialism could be brought about by gradually reforming the existing system, but today they offer little more than neoliberalism with a human face. What lessons can socialists draw from the history of social democracy?