This will probably make no sense, but then it’s my blog and I can write whatever rubbish I want. Do also note that throughout the following I use “Revisionism” to mean Fifties Revisionism (Bad Godesberg, Crosland and so on), not the Revisionism of Bernstein and his followers over half a century earlier.
1. Revisionism is, fundamentally, a child of the ’50’s, an attempt to adapt Socialism to a period of sustained economic growth and new consumer affluence. Indeed, an assumption that this would continue “forever” (sound familiar?) was key to intellectual justifications of Revisionism (re-read The Future of Socialism and you’ll see what I mean) and was an obvious influence on many the policies of post-Revisionist social-democratic governments.
2. This is actually one of the reasons why European social-democratic parties have, since the late ’50’s, tended to do better when the economy has done well than during recessions; the unfortunate reality is that such parties just have less to offer both their core working class supporters and swing voters when the economy is in a bad way. Even before the mess in the financial pigsty exploded last Autumn, the economic outlook (and reality) was poor across Europe and the poll ratings of just about every social-democratic party were, frankly, dismal.
3. There’s, obviously, something wrong here. At least two problems are clear; the first is the tendency of Revisionism to confuse means with ends, the second is that Revisionism was a response to a very specific problem fifty years ago and is clearly unsuited to the the present day… and, yet, it’s all that “we” have. Almost all subsequent developments within social-democracy have either built on the foundations of Revisionism or belong firmly outside the social-democratic tradition (and were, and are, thus, at best, a distraction. And at worst a threat).
4. I want to write something about the tendency to accept existing economic and political structures more-or-less as they are (it’s a major, major, major flaw in Revisionism; as seems even more obvious now than when I first started musing about this sort of thing a few years ago), but can’t think of the right way to word it. For another day I think.
In other words, social-democracy needs to break out of the gilded ghetto it mistakenly built itself five decades ago and revise away from Revisionism. It’s clearly not suited to the times that we live in.
More on this at a later date, presumably. Apologies if none of the above made much sense.
EDIT: “…gilded ghetto it mistakenly built itself…” Christ. Did I write that? Talk about gross oversimplification and not all that fair either; postwar revisionism (for all its flaws) was a fairly logical response to the situation facing Socialist parties at the time. The problem was more a failure to realise that it that was all it was and all it could be…
