With Jeremy Corbyn likely on the verge of becoming the next leader of the British Labour Party, old questions about the potential of European social democracy are again of political concern.

For decades, the leaders of Europe’s social-democratic and labor parties attempted to use the machinery of the liberal-democratic state to transform capitalism from within. But as Gerassimos Moschonas demonstrates in his 2002 book In the Name of Social Democracy, it is capitalism that has transformed social democracy — not the other way around.

Over the last thirty years, virtually all social-democratic parties have presided over some degree of market deregulation, commercialization, and privatization of the public sector, and at least the piecemeal implementation of welfare-state retrenchment. One might expect working-class parties, even ones with fairly autocratic internal lives, to be largely immune from an intellectual, ideological embrace of neoliberal doctrine. Workers and union leaders tend not to demand that austerity measures be imposed upon themselves.