Corporatism and Reformism: The Social Democratic Institutionalization of Class Conflict

Abstract

Corporatism has generally been seen as a way of incorporating an unwilling working class into the capitalist system. Searching for possible explanations of corporatism, one has to take into consideration the great variety of the degree of corporatism within Western states This vanety shows a firm relationship between states that have strong corporatist structures and states with a successful reformist labour movement, that is, Austria, Norway and Sweden and to some extent Denmark and the FRG This indicates that there is something wrong with the functionalist thesis that corporatism is a way of taming the working class. The aim of this article is to raise some hypotheses about the reasons why polities dominated by Social Democracy seem especially to foster corporatist structures. It is argued that in order to understand the relationship between the existence of corporatist structures and a successful Social Democracy, we have to scrutinize the logic of the system of bargaining between capitalists and workers that the capitalist relations of production brings forth.