Criticism
| This section requires expansion. |
Marxian socialists of the classical, orthodox and analytical variations argue that because social democratic programs retain the capitalist mode of production, they also retain the fundamental issues of capitalism, including cyclical fluctuations, exploitation and alienation. Social democratic programs intended to ameliorate capitalism, such as unemployment benefits, taxation on profits and the wealthy, create contradictions of their own by limiting the efficiency of the capitalist system by reducing incentives for capitalists to invest in production.
Democratic socialists, such as David Schweickart, contrast social democracy with democratic socialism by defining the former as an attempt to strengthen the welfare state, and the latter as an alternative socialist economic system to capitalism. According to Schweickart, the democratic socialist critique of social democracy states that capitalism could never be sufficiently "humanized", and any attempt to suppress the economic contradictions of capitalism would only cause them to emerge elsewhere. For example, attempts to reduce unemployment too much would result in inflation, and too much job security would erode labor discipline. In contrast to social democracy, democratic socialists advocate a post-capitalist economic system based either on market socialism combined with workers self-management, or on some form of participatory-economic planning.
Market socialists contrast social democracy with market socialism. While a common goal of both systems is to achieve greater social and economic equality, market socialism does so by changes in enterprise ownership and management, whereas social democracy attempts to do so by government-imposed taxes and subsidies on privately-owned enterprises. Frank Roosevelt and David Belkin criticize social democracy for maintaining a property-owning capitalist class, which has an active interest in reversing social democratic policies and a disproportionate amount of power over society to influence governmental policy as a class.
Another criticism of social democracy has to do with its relationship to neoliberalism and labour unions. It is argued in Social Democracy: After the Cold War, that
"social democratic parties shifted to the right in the 1980’s, abandoning their traditional policy stance and embracing neoliberalism – either explicitly or in the guise of a ‘Third Way.’ Ultimately, they distanced themselves from their core union base to regain electoral viability."
Communists accuse social democracy of accepting the values of capitalist society and therefore not being a genuine form of socialism.
Read more about this topic: Social Democracy
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)