It might be argued that this is a somewhat minor example, but the “Belgian case” was in fact of considerable importance at the turn of the century. It is no accident that both the major theoretical journals of German Social Democracy — Kautsky’s Neue Zeit and the Sozialistische Monatshefte — were frequently involved in bitter controversies over the general strikes in Belgium.

The explanation is that Rosa Luxemburg was at the time trying to justify a form of mass action that was distinct from both and not hostile to party action at a European level. In the East, the debate was fueled by the first convulsions of the Russian Revolution; in the West, it was fueled by a repetition of the mass upheavals for which the Belgian working class had been famous for a decade. A small country and a relatively small party thus posed a serious problem and gave rise to a major debate.

When it was founded in 1885, the Parti Ouvrier Belge [Belgian Labour Party] was little more than a set of political initials, a hypothetical organization. The contrast between the future it saw for itself, its self-proclaimed vocation and its ambitions, and its real standing was considerable. In a country where industry was developing more rapidly than anywhere else in continental Europe, the proletariat was ill-informed, hyper-exploited, and slow to mobilize. Enormous masses of workers were concentrated in the coal mines, the metal-working industries, the glass works, and the textile mills.

But these hundreds of thousands of illiterate workers could scarcely have been less politicized. In the great centers of economic development in the south of the country, this apoliticism had a very specific meaning. They rejected politics and refused to see that resorting to political means might provide a solution to their poverty, even though they regarded it as unjust and intolerable.

This attitude, which was shared by many workers, was not unrelated to the influence of the most radical forms of Proudhonism. There was constant agitation in the industrial areas and in the coalfields, where the First International had enjoyed a certain success in about 1870. The agitation took the form of ill-planned strikes which were called without any regard for the conjuncture, which were poorly coordinated and badly led, if they were led at all, and which provoked severe repression. At times strikes broke out and spread without any demands ever being put forward.

Was this in fact a social movement? It was more a matter of cries of protest, which became more violent and more strident than ever in 1886. Whole areas of the country were quite literally in flames. Tens of thousands of workers were involved in tumultuous demonstrations, in the destruction of property, and in looting.

All this was a prelude to a massacre in which the “forces of law and order” displayed an unbridled savagery. It would have been difficult to imagine anything less political than these riots. The young Parti Ouvrier stood by passively, worried and unhappy. It took the view that any repetition of these events would be disastrous.

The young party, which was still little more than an embryo, saw its future in terms of the gradual and systematic organization of a class which, under its leadership, would be able to win reforms that would improve or even transform workers’ conditions. It believed that such transformations would not take place without social legislation, which the state systematically refused to implement because of its rigid non-interventionism. How could the state be forced to shrug off a passivity which the bourgeoisie was doing its best to encourage? The only solution lay in political action. In other words, pressure had to be brought to bear upon governmental and parliamentary institutions.

Obviously, the Parti Ouvrier did also encourage the workers to protect themselves by means of friendly societies, cooperatives, and unions. But its strategy was primarily directed towards overcoming state resistance. Universal suffrage therefore became the emerging movement’s primary objective. Unfortunately, conservative obstinacy was not the only obstacle it had to face. The workers themselves were not interested; their anarchistic tendencies made them skeptical about the virtues of political action, which they identified with institutional action.

The history of the first decades in the life of the Parti Ouvrier is the history of a double victory. It succeeded in awakening the political consciousness of the industrial proletariat and in channelling its militancy towards the conquest of universal suffrage. It also brought pressure to bear on successive governments and forced them to make major concessions both in the socioeconomic domain and at the political level. The bourgeois state’s unconditional laissez-faire attitude was overcome and the people were finally granted the right to take part in elections on a mass scale.

Both these developments — the politicization of the working class, which went hand in hand with the establishment of an autonomous working-class organization, and the reforms won from the government — resulted from a dynamic which was painful and frequently contradictory. It was, however, a real and very efficacious dynamic in that it allowed the relationship articulating party and masses to be outlined.

As a result, a movement which, despite its occasional use of revolutionary rhetoric, made no secret of its basic reformism was able to force through major and promising reforms. They may well have been limited, but their importance could not be denied. Insofar as it was a “classic” social-democratic organization, the Parti Ouvrier provides a very good illustration of the logic of reformism, of its workings, its development, and of how it can become blocked.

The logic of the Parti Ouvrier was essentially dialectical. Its founders (a “general staff without troops,” as one of the leaders put it) feared, perhaps more than anything else, a repetition of the popular disturbances of 1886. Many of its leaders enjoyed privileged relationships, both personal and political, with the Liberals. They shared their anti-clericalism and often regarded them as intermediaries between themselves and the government, which was in the hands of the Catholics. Most of the party leadership wanted the state to adopt a more flexible attitude and to negotiate.

But their opponents’ harsh moderates refused to do so. The “agitators” and “speech-makers” had no access to ministers and therefore looked ridiculous rather than dangerous. If it was to be taken seriously, the social-democratic leadership had to make its presence felt, either directly or indirectly. Unless the leaders of the Parti Ouvrier could show that they had a winning card in their hand neither contacts with the government nor direct or indirect negotiations could produce even modest gains.

The leaders soon realized that without the presence of the organized masses and without mass action they could do nothing and were nothing. They had no support from any influential group; the only secret weapon in their arsenal was a humanist rhetoric. They could conceive of no initiative that would sway or even impress the government. Reform was their very raison d’etre, but they could not convince the government of the need for reform. They therefore had to rely upon threats, and their threats soon took a very concrete form: the threat of a general strike.

There is something of a paradox or rather a contradiction here. The only way in which a party of moderates could pursue its moderate, gradualist, and basically reformist strategy was to become radicalized and to bare its teeth. The threat of a general strike, which was borrowed from the slogans and myths of the anarchists, frightened the social democrats as much as it frightened the bourgeoisie, if not more so. It suggested all the dangers or mirages of an anti-political strategy. It meant calling upon the proletariat to free itself by laying down its tools rather than by using the ballot box. It meant calling upon it to use its economic power (even if it was the power of inertia) rather than using or demanding the political rights which the Parti Ouvrier thought were essential.

There were also more serious problems. Assuming that it was possible to use this weapon, how could a general strike be controlled in such a way as to prevent “extremists” from taking over? The threat of a general strike was seen as a means of bringing pressure to bear in negotiations, but would the negotiators be able to control it? If they could not do so, the threat was useless and might backfire against the would-be negotiators.

And although the Social Democratic leadership did state in 1889 that it was in the last resort ready to call a general strike in order to win universal suffrage, it qualified its ultimatum with reservations that expressed both its hopes and its fears. It was reluctant to take what looked like a leap into the unknown. It was afraid that it would lose the troops it had only just begun to recruit, that they would become discouraged and depoliticized. It hoped that its threats would be enough to make the government give way and that there would be no need to draw this double-edged weapon.

But unless the militants were mobilized, the general strike organized, and the demonstrations planned, such ultimatums would impress no one. And how could those preparations be made unless at least a verbal radicalism stirred up working-class anger?

For years, the social-democratic leaders had no alternative but to oscillate between very moderate statements and increasingly rash calls for action. Elsewhere, I describe the life-giving but dangerous contradiction that social-democratic reformism had to face, no matter how reluctantly, if it was to become a true political force:

Between 1885 and the First World War, a whole generation of leaders and militants had to wrestle with contradictory demands. They had to maintain a demand and a virtual myth (universal suffrage). They had to inspire enthusiasm and at the same time keep it in check. They had to take one step at a time and to negotiate, sometimes displaying intransigence but usually recommending compromise. They had to build up hopes and at the same time call for realism. They had to whip up idealism and then temper it with reason. They had to rely upon both quasi-revolutionary energy and quasi-conservative common sense, to inspire passion and quell impatience. They had to vilify their adversaries without making enemies of them; they had to be considerate to their allies and had to chivvy them along at the same time. They had to recruit forces they hoped they would never have to use. They had to compromise and at the same time give the impression that they represented the inevitability of electoral reform, or even that of revolution. What a program! And what skill, suppleness and intelligence were needed to implement a continuous program of action that was continually threatened by the obstinacy of the bourgeoisie and continually placed in jeopardy by pressure from the proletariat!

Obviously, the social-democratic option, as opposed to the revolutionary choice, was not an easy option! An examination of the general strikes organized by the Parti Ouvrier in 1893, 1902, and 1913 provides adequate proof of that. Let us look briefly at the events and at the lessons to be learned from them.

On all three occasions, the initiative behind the strike movement came from the anger and impatience of the masses. The Parti Ouvrier had succeeded only too well in convincing them of the importance of universal suffrage. The industrial proletariat mobilized and became politicized because it came to see electoral reform as more than a mere objective: it was a sacred cause which embodied its greatest hopes and for which no sacrifice was too great.

The social-democratic party and its leaders temporized for as long as possible and only called for a general strike when large sectors of the working class had already taken spontaneous strike action. In 1893 and 1902, the strikes were accompanied by serious disorders, which the party’s cadres tried in vain to prevent. When the police savagely repressed the popular agitation, the social-democratic leaders hastily called off the strikes before their objectives had been won.

As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out at the time, on both occasions they entered into secret negotiations with the Liberal Party, which acted as an intermediary with the government, and had become its hostages. Both strikes were called off without the appropriate party bodies being consulted.

The more resolute workers bitterly protested that their leaders had betrayed them. When, in 1893, the conservatives agreed to a major concession and granted “universal suffrage” tempered by multiple votes, the leadership described a partial victory as a complete triumph. The defeat of 1902 was put down to the influence of “extremists,” and the Parti Ouvrier began to concentrate on “taming” the general strike by taking exclusive control. It succeeded in doing so in 1913, but it was less successful when it came to dealing with the government, which refused to grant universal suffrage pure and simple.

It is however, true that, in these circumstances, the action of tens of thousands of workers did paralyze the industrial regions of the country on all three occasions. It it also true to say that the Belgian bourgeoisie found itself coming under almost constant pressure from a proletariat which had been both radicalized and held back by Social Democracy, which was both increasingly militant and increasingly contained. Social Democracy depended for its political credibility upon the power of a movement it distrusted and which it wanted to hold back; its ability to negotiate was determined by actions which both gave it its strength and threatened its reformist strategy.

The result of this kind of practice by European Social Democracy was very contradictory. Social Democracy had organized and radicalized workers. It had made a major contribution to the process whereby the working class became an agent of social change. It had forced the state to make major concessions which did improve the condition and status of the proletariat. But its accomplishments were also very limited; whatever anyone may have said, or sometimes feared, the social democrats had been reluctant to enter the struggle and had rapidly entered into negotiations, and the reforms secured by these methods did not constitute a step towards the abolition of capitalism.

In this sense, while Social Democracy had been very successful, when it came to organizing the working class and strengthening it, it was a failure. It betrayed the aims of classic reformism in two ways: it owed its successes to methods which were much more brutal than those implied by its moderate philosophy and its legalism; and, valuable as they may have been, its successes did not open up the road to socialism. On the contrary, the fact that it had occupied a certain territory within the state apparatus meant that Social Democracy was rapidly integrated into that apparatus. As a result, it assumed that it no longer needed to rely upon the powerful but compromising weapon of mass action.

Until 1914, Social Democracy saw the assault upon the state as a necessary evil. After the First World War, a “governmental” or “responsible” social democracy developed, and assaults on the state were seen as an absolute evil. In the 1920s and 1930s no reformist party in Europe encouraged or even allowed the masses to take offensive action. In that sense, the Popular Front was never anything more than a defensive strategy designed to restrict the working class to a supporting role, to being an electoral auxiliary.

It is not surprising that Social Democracy lost its oppositional strength. The resources of reformism, partly as a result of the effects of the economic crisis but also because the old strategy of simultaneously encouraging and holding back the most active workers, gave way to purely institutional action. Social Democracy had been discredited in 1914 and defeated in the 1930s and when, after the Second World War, a wind of reform began to sweep across Europe, it was only by deluding itself as to its strength and its future that it could hope for a renaissance.

Obviously, it did derive some prestige from nationalizations and from the establishment of a social insurance system which was somewhat hastily baptized the “welfare state.” Its representatives were often given important posts within the state, sometimes with temporary Communist support. But these successes were temporary, and Social Democracy was not being rewarded for its own merits. They represented the provisional defeat of a right wing which had been discredited by the fascist adventure and which had been forced on to the defensive by the joint victories of the Soviet Union and the Resistance.

A new era was opening up for Social Democracy. In its original or classic form, it was now a thing of the past. There was no longer any question of implementing a sequence of reforms so as to transform the state by legal means. Still less was there any question of abolishing capitalism. The reformism of the past, as incarnated by Kautsky, was dead. It was replaced by a strategy which owed its real inspiration to Keynes, who was no socialist, and which pursued objectives whose modesty would have astonished Bernstein himself.

The foreign policy adopted by its various leaders is the best illustration of the profound change in social-democratic ambitions. Prior to 1914, when it still represented a viable option, Social Democracy mobilized the working class to defend peace against imperialism, which Lenin was not alone in seeing as “the highest stage of capitalism.” It inspired great hopes and when it failed to fulfill its promise, it attracted equally great opprobrium.

Between the wars, it adopted more modest ambitions. It was merely an impotent, passive participant in the fight against fascism. The immediate postwar period was even more disastrous. Social Democratic foreign policy was increasingly effective, but it worked to the advantage of American capitalism, especially when men like Spaak, Blum, and Bevin gave it the cachet of democracy. And whilst the aberrations of Soviet policy justified its harshest critics, no neo-reformist leader was ever tempted by neutralism.

In terms of the colonial question, the “classic reformist” tendency within the Second International had never resolved the controversy between those who systematically opposed colonialism and those who wanted primarily to humanize it. Between the wars, Social Democracy paid little attention to a problem that had yet to come to the front of the political stage. During the Cold War period, its representatives enthusiastically took the side of the United States, and as the old reformism degenerated many social-democratic parties lent their support to colonialism. Their supposed loathing for violence did not prevent them from taking part in the most bloody adventures, an area in which France’s Guy Mollet particularly distinguished himself.

Foreign policy was merely one aspect of social-democratic politics. Whereas the old socialist humanism had placed its hopes in international arbitration and the League of Nations, the neo-reformists invested NATO with a democratic mission, if not a civilizing mission.

In terms of domestic politics, neo-reformism collapsed into an unequivocal statism. Certain of its representatives had long been susceptible to the appeal of a “strong state,” but the defeat of the authoritarian regimes in 1945 had put an end to those suicidal temptations. After the war, however, and lasting for a whole generation, statism took the form of the defense of a policy of collaboration between labor and capital, with the state intervening if the balance of power seemed to be shifting rather too blatantly towards the employers.

Social democrats introduced protective social legislation which was, in theory, designed to protect the weak and a taxation policy which was designed to redistribute wealth. They argued that the state should have a major role in the task of economic modernization. But when it came to putting their plans into practice, the social democrats showed no hesitation in introducing an incomes policy and in putting pressure on their “social partners,” and in that respect they showed no indulgence towards the trade unions.

There is no escaping the conclusion that the new-style reformism means reformism without reforms. Whilst reformism is only too ready to boast of its realism, as opposed to the “dreams” of its detractors, it has for years been showing all the symptoms of chronic anemia, particularly in terms of its stated aims of implementing far-reaching reforms leading to socialism and of making electoral gains.

There are many reasons why social democracy finds itself in this impasse and why it has betrayed itself. Only one such reason will be discussed here. It is important because it brings out the differences between the social democracy of the past and that of today.

The social democrats of the past played a historical role whose inadequacy was revealed in 1914. Whilst that cannot be denied, this negative judgment is not in itself enough. Social democracy appeared at a time when the proletariat was just beginning to be concentrated and when its awakening class consciousness was still low. At a time when the great inadequacies of its emergent institutions made it a docile instrument of the bourgeoisie, social democracy (the reformist majority and the revolutionary minority alike) led the proletariat out of the political desert. It thus had the considerable merit of helping to constitute workers into a class.

Although it was tangled up in thousands of contradictions, classic social democracy brought together the talents of journalists, agitators and administrators, united men of culture, militants and organizers and provided the proletariat with the many institutions without which it would have been impossible to develop the class independence essential to the development of any class consciousness. It provided the necessary but inadequate basis for the victory of socialism. This is why the working class identified so closely with social democracy, even though there was still considerable friction and tension.

The war was a moment of truth which left no room for hesitations or for confusion, and it clearly revealed that the institutional base provided by these social, political, economic, and cultural organizations did not provide a springboard for more decisive victories. On the contrary, whenever an increasingly organized working class became capable of making an assault on capitalist positions, they acted as so many brakes on the movement. The reformers’ heirs had proved themselves efficient managers of socialist organizations, and they now proved themselves to be aggressive managers of the bourgeois state.

When the actions of the proletariat threatened the established order, they showed no compunction about resorting to violence. Noske, who had played the role of the “bloody dog” in dealing with the Spartacists, almost met his match in the person of Salengro, the French social democrat who threatened to use force against striking workers in 1936. Almost ten years later, his compatriot and comrade Jules Moch matched action to words by using the police and gendarmerie against the miners of northern France.

Extra-parliamentary action was deemed not only dangerous but even sacrilegious. The most important effect of this development was to deprive Social Democracy of a weapon which was difficult to wield and which was rarely used, but which was at least theoretically available to it, namely mass action. Once that had been abandoned, the only weapon left in the arsenal of neo-reformism was the blunt sword of electoral pressure.

A few exceptional periods aside, the desire for electoral success led to the dilution of the social-democratic program. Attempts to win over “floating voters” inevitably led to a timid centrism. Statements of principle and party programs of course sometimes used a rhetoric which evoked past epics, but that semblance of fidelity was itself a more or less centrist tactic designed to retain the loyalty of those workers and voters who were nostalgic for the real or imaginary audacity of the past.

If we compare the old social democracy with the modern version, we reach the following conclusions:

1. The reformists of the past, or at least such of them who preferred the discreet influence of Kautsky to the compromising patronage of Bernstein, still thought of themselves as radicals. They still thought that it might be possible to use the weapon of revolution, albeit in a hypothetical and distant future. In this context, it should be noted that revolution was seen as a possible response to initiatives from a reactionary bourgeoisie. Revolution was a possibility. But not in the foreseeable future.
2. With the exception of openly rightist elements, the reformists of the past realized that if they were to be able to exert pressure or even to become a serious political force, they had to rely upon working-class organizations or even upon the active and militant political intervention of the working class. The problem of how to use and control the masses was one of the main elements influencing the problematic and dynamics of social democracy. This was particularly important in terms of actions affecting the bourgeois state. Once it had forced its way into the state, social democracy increasingly acted within it and gradually abandoned any idea of transforming it, arguing that the state should in fact have a greater role, especially in the economic domain. Once it had abandoned the call to the masses and even the threat of making such a call, social-democratic tactics were designed to make gains within a neo-capitalist society in which the mixed economy gave the administrators who had emerged from its ranks a relatively important role. This was the positional warfare described by Gramsci . . . without the fighting.
3. This development meant more than the end of any vision of socialism in the sense that the founders of socialism and the early reformists understood the term. Having lost its trump cards, this new version of social democracy has lost its ability to reform the capitalist system in any real or lasting sense. At best, it hopes to hold parliamentary power for a period of office. This means that the Right can simply undo what the Left has done if its initiatives go against the interests of the ruling classes. Usually, the Right leaves intact those measures implemented by its timid adversary which appear to be in its own long-term interests. When the Left is “in power,” its insistence on moderation and its desire for appeasement normally lead it to adopt policies which the more lucid or less demagogic elements on the Right would never seriously dream of rejecting.

To conclude. The political skill which “classic reformism” displayed when it articulated offensives on the part of social-democratic parties, on the basis of the pressure exerted by a united and organized working class which it had to control if it was to have any autonomy in its negotiations with the bourgeoisie, has now degenerated into mere politicking. It is therefore impossible to elaborate any real program or to raise any real hopes. The purpose of all the politicking is to strengthen centers of sectorial power within the state apparatus by maintaining the fiction that the party has broader ambitions and by appealing to the authority of a history which has lost all meaning.

Even the accomplishments of the old social democracy — the precious but limited reforms which did not even challenge the capitalist order — are beyond the grasp of contemporary reformism. Whilst tradition obliges us to use labels like “reformism” and “social democracy,” only those who stand to gain from them are fooled by them.

It should be quite clear to attentive readers, careful observers, informed critics, and lucid participants in the political battle that the reformism of the past has fulfilled its historical mission, that it has lost its dynamism, and that its narrow limitations are now obvious. It is no more than a shadow of its former self, a ghost, a form of nostalgia. A nostalgia, ridiculous and poignant, for something which once existed and will never exist again.