Social Democracy Research Articles

Sosialisme Demokratis Dalam Kebhinekaan Indonesia

The purpose of writing this journal is to find out how social democracy is implemented in the Indonesian framework. The main principles of social democracy, such as protection of human rights, social welfare, and economic justice, can become the basis for a social democratic view of life in Indonesia. This journal uses a qualitative descriptive approach using content analysis methods and literature studies. The content analysis method is a research method used to identify conclusions from a text. In contrast, literature studies in this research use types and secondary sources of information obtained from research results, posts and reference books that cover topics related to the theme of the journal. Solutions to social democratic problems that are still not fully implemented in Indonesia's diversity Even though Indonesia has adopted social democratic principles in its constitution, there are still many challenges in its implementation. One of the biggest challenges is the limitations in running a fair and equitable system for all levels of society.
 Keywords: social, Indonesia, democracy

Social media and democracy: The Fiji 2022 National Election

Since the 2014 Fiji General Election, social media political campaigning has continued to be a consistent feature in the country’s politics. This was evident in the 2022 National Election with many more political parties engaging in creative and innovative ways to campaign and engage voters. Since the 2018 elections, there have been a number of developments that led to the formation of new parties and declining popularity of the ruling FijiFirst party. This has provided a new context for social media political campaigning. Building on reviewed work around social media political campaigning from the 2014 and 2018 national elections, this article examines social media use in the 2022 General Election. It discusses some of the emergent trends and patterns of campaigning that are likely to prevail in social media use and Fiji elections.

Constructing Subaltern Worldview in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

The central concern for many Indian writers, settled abroad, either remains diasporic experiences or their concerns about the othering of the poor by the affluent in modern India against the backdrop of the realities of the two opposing conceptions of India: the envisioned Independent India of the post-freedom struggle and the modern India of the rich. Caste and class structures are an imperial barrier to democratic socialism and economic equality, which causes the poor to be victimized. Because they lack resources and are therefore helpless, the underprivileged continue to be used as tools of the elite capitalist class. With the background established, Adiga’s The White Tiger holds a central position to establish the voice of the marginalized to challenge the country's booming prosperity.
 This paper attempts to critically analyze The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga through a socio-Political perspective to depict India’s socio-cultural and political context and how the larger politics impact the micro level realities of common people. Similarly, it attempts to establish a marginalized by showcasing the life of a low-born person involved in the local politics and policy.

Jawaharlal Nehru’s Vision for Citizen-centric Administration

After Independence from the British rule, India adopted a new Constitution in 1950 framed by the Constituent Assembly. Under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru as the first Prime Minister, India followed the path of ‘democratic socialism’ to establish the ‘socialistic pattern of society’. Though Nehru started with a new vision and vigour, yet he was left with a traditional administrative machinery inherited from the colonial era. Nehru wanted to overhaul the Indian Civil Service (ICS) machinery to suit the objectives of new India by making it more citizen-centric and more participatory, and constituted the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) in its place. This article tries to outline the vision of Nehru for a citizen-centric public administration. The article analyses the role of the Preamble to the Constitution and Nehru’s Objectives Resolution in defining popular moorings and sanctions for public administration. Delineating major colonial inheritances in the administrative machinery, the article in its later part, analyses Nehru’s thoughts on citizen-centric administration, especially focusing on a human touch in Indian public administration.

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: ANALYZING SOCIAL POWER AND CULTURAL IDENTITY IN MOROCCAN EFL HIGH SCHOOL GATEWAY TO ENGLISH 2 TEXTBOOK

This article aims to examine social power and cultural identity in four units of Gateway to English 2 textbook in Morocco, it is a textbook for teaching English as a foreign language for second baccalaureate. Besides, the variety of languages along with regional Moroccan dialects entail different cultural perspectives and political guidelines to project students’ orientations and national red lines to respect, since school is regarded as an area for national identities by using pedagogical implementations. In addition, the curriculum mustn’t be a vehicle to convey social inequality or bias, but rather a suitable vehicle to promote social democracy and justice for all cultural identities, and in doing so, critical pedagogy can be an effective strategy for all students to see themselves in the curriculum and reshape future guidelines for themselves and their society. The data of this study was analysed through three stages of Fairclough’s (Fairclough, 2017) approach to critical discourse analysis: description, interpretation, and explanation. The findings revealed that Gateway to English 2 textbook misrepresented Moroccan women in terms of literacy, knowledge and social position in Moroccan society and conveyed social and political guidelines.
 Keywords: social power and cultural identity, Gateway to English textbook, critical pedagogy

Austria: Political Developments and Data in 2022

AbstractAustrian politics in 2022 was affected by high levels of public dissatisfaction. The year was dominated by pandemic fatigue, rising inflation and the reconditioning of the so‐called Austrian People's Party/Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP) corruption‐affaire. Consequently, the national government parties of the Christian‐Democratic ÖVP and the Greens/Die Grünen–Die Grüne Alternative (GRÜNE) further lost at the polls, while the main opposition parties—especially the right‐wing Austrian Freedom Party/Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs—gained public support. The presidential election in October confirmed a second term for the sitting President, Alexander Van der Bellen. The regional election in Tyrol brought severe losses for the regional (and national) governing parties, ÖVP and Greens. Despite its losses, the ÖVP secured its position in regional government and formed a coalition with the Austrian Social Democratic Party/Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs after the election in Tyrol.

Class struggle and the origins of finance capital in Britain, 1870–1920

Marxists often link the emergence of finance capital to developments in the categories of capital, such as flight to money capital, sometimes associated with changes in the organic composition of capital. While not disputing the importance of transformations in capitalist categories, this paper examines the causal role of working-class agency in the emergence of finance capital. The paper addresses finance capital in Britain, giving due consideration to a variety of causal factors cementing its dominance. It then considers the role of labour unrest in developing a working class in itself, gravitating towards and away from political expressions (syndicalism, social democracy) in pursuance of its immediate economic struggles. The overall argument is that the emergence of finance capital in the parasitic form it took in Britain was fundamentally a response to the power of a working class in itself. Parasitism became the default trend to control the working class and prevent any potential movement towards a working class for itself from gaining hegemony.

Clara Zetkin and the Socialist Women’s International

This article focuses on the political activities of women within German Social Democracy and the Socialist Women's International. The leader of both organisations, Clara Zetkin, wrote texts that provided the theoretical foundations for the Marxist perspective on the ‘woman question’ and paved the way for the incorporation of working women into the proletarian struggle for socialism. Based on the proceedings and reports of the socialist women’s conferences, we reconstruct the main discussions and resolutions of these organisations until their dissolution in 1915, such as the relationship with bourgeois feminists, protective legislation for female workers, women's suffrage, and International Women’s Day.

Transition of television in the Republic of Moldova during 1978-1988 years

The years 1978-1987 were marked by the dramatic transition from a totalitarian political system to a more democratic society, which significantly impacted also the television of the Republic of Moldova. However, broadcasting from the end of the years ‘70, and the beginning of the ‘80s, continued to take place under the same conditions of fierce censorship, typical for the previous periods. The editorial policies of the visual were focused mostly on reflecting the ,,communist education” of the people, of the communist party propaganda, and the endless transmission of reportages about the socialist contest ,,from Congress to Congress”. Starting from the second half of the ‘80s, when the „Perestroika”, and „Glasnost” - transparency and democratization policies officially were announced, the changes in the mass media become more visible and significant. In the beginning, several new broadcasts appeared, where the ways of building a new model of socialism were been discussed: - „democratic socialism”, „developed socialism”, „socialism with a human face” and other inventions of communist ideology. Yet, more and more unusual phrases sounded for the Soviet viewer in the broadcast, such as „general-human values”, „pluralism of opinions”, „democratic system” and so on. New visions and ideas of transforming the community, of radical political, social, and economic changes were debated in society. In the end, they brought about the collapse of the Party-State, the disappearance of the centralized state television, and the arrival of a new competitive system of audiovisual.

Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism

The popular narrative that capitalism has led to a general improvement in human well-being over the last two hundred years is, historical data show, not supported by evidence. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan enumerate the empirical and methodological problems on which this narrative is built and explore the potential benchmarks for truly understanding human welfare.

사회국가원리의 이론적 형성과 법적 구현과정 과정에 대한 검토

The German social state theory sets its starting point in emphasizing the role of the state for the realization of individual freedom, based on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hege's philosophical thought of the state. Social democrats demand increased opportunities for political participation beyond the satisfaction of individual material desires. They emphasize the superiority of the state or politics over the economy in order to justify the state's intervention in the economic order to realize social justice. The tradition of social democracy that justifies the state's intervention in the economic order for the realization of socio-economic justice is reflected in Article 119, Paragraph 2 of our Constitution. This constitutional provision reflects the core elements of the social market economic order theory (Soziale Marktwirtschaft) based on Hermann Heller's theory of the social rule of law (sozialer Rechtsstaat), which succeeded Hegel's theory of state philosophy in terms of comparative constitutional law study. As a conservative social reformer, Lorenz von Stein's important achievements were to foresee the importance of social problems related to the social alienation of the proletariat, the proletariat, in the process of modern industrialization, and the political dangers of class struggle that would result from this, in advance. It can be seen that it is in the point of presenting the theory of the state related to the role of the state in solving social problems. In order to prevent the spread of the destructive nature of social problems related to the social gap between the rich and the poor and to enable the free personal development of all citizens, he set survival guarantee as a key task of the state. Stein presents the following two solutions as solutions to these problems of capitalist society: ① the end of competitive social relations, ② the dissolution, weakening, and extinction of class structure. Stein seeks a solution to end the ever-evolving class struggle and the ideology that justifies it in an independent social state (der soziale Staat) that aims for the public welfare, free from the interests of any particular class. Stein accepts Hegel's philosophy of state, which sets the guarantee of individual survival as the state's task, and recognizes the state's support for individuals without the ability to Hermann Heller's theory of social rule of law is an attempt to realize the state's efforts to realize social justice and security in the form of democracy. In this process, efforts to realize social integration by the state emerge as an important factor. After all, the core element of reformist social democracy is the pursuit of gradual social reform through democratic means. This justifies the government, which has realized democratic legitimacy, to intervene in the economic order for the benefit of the whole society. Nevertheless, modern social democracy must develop into a form that presents a new alternative to realize social justice for the state and society through new forms of reform and innovation. The various historical establishment processes of the principle of the social state and the historical development of the legal ideology supporting it have become an important cause of various legal theoretical discussions on the social state. The German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) accepts the principle of the social state (Sozialstaat) as a constitutional requirement. Although the German Basic Law does not explicitly use the concept of the social state, in Article 20, Paragraph 1 of the Basic Law, the “Social Federal State (sozialer Bundesstaat)” ｣ And in Article 28, which guarantees the homogeneity of the state constitutional order with the Basic Law (Homogenitätsklausel), the adjective and transformative expression of ｢social rule of law (sozialer Rechtsstaat)｣ is used. It is necessary to examine the state theories of constitutional thinkers such as Lonrenz von Stein and Hermann Heller,

INTRAPARTY COMMUNICATION AND PERMEABILITY IN THE SPÖ FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF LOCAL POLITICAL ACTORS

ABSTRACT The Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) has seen its electorate steadily decline in recent years. As the party struggles to communicate clear messages to voters, debates about the internal party’s communication and leadership are increasingly being played out in the media. This study examines the perceptions of local political actors of the SPÖ regarding intra-party communication between organizational levels. The research methodology includes problem-centered interviews and group discussions with 12 local SPÖ actors from Lower Austria and Vienna. The results of the study shed light on key issues such as the need for improved intra-party communication and better transition structures for activists within the party organization. The recent success of the Communist Party (KPÖ Plus) in the federal state of Salzburg in April 2023 underscores the challenges facing the SPÖ in the current situation. Two of the three candidates for the membership referendum from April 24-May 10, 2023, in which the party base will make a preliminary decision on the future leadership of the SPÖ in order to end internal strife, argue for breaking through elitist bubbles and creating a grassroots participatory party that reflects the grassroots sentiment surveyed in this study. Keywords: social democracy, organizational communication, organizational crisis

From Jacobin flaws to transformative populism: Left populism and the legacy of European social democracy

From Jacobin flaws to transformative populism: Left populism and the legacy of European social democracy

SOCIAL DILEMMAS OF THE SWEDISH ECONOMIC MODEL IN THE POST-WAR PERIOD

The article analyzes the stages development of the Swedish economic model from the mid-nineteenth century to the crisis in period 20082010. Sweden is the richest Scandinavian country and one of the most industrialized countries in the world. Sweden is an economically highly developed and efficiently organized country. For the last few years, the economy has been in a phase of economic growth. In the period 20182021, the gross domestic product (GDP) grew at a rate of almost 2.0% in the conditions of low inflation (approx. 3% annually) and a relatively high unemployment rate (7.0% in 2019 and 8.8% in 2021). The economic results achieved by Sweden are not accidental. This is the result of the harmonized economic policy pursued continuously by the Swedish government, which actively affects the material course of economic growth processes in this country. The development of economic policy in Sweden can be divided into two periods: the first (1970s and 1980s) was characterized by the decline of traditionally understood industrialization. The change in the political arena in the period 1976-1982, which resulted in the removal of the Social Democrats from power, did not stop the subsequent fiscalism and the increase in public and social spending. The rate of economic growth in the long-term horizon was declining. Between 1961 and 1970, the average annual growth of Swedish GDP was 8.9%, 5.6% in the 1970s and 6.9% in the 1980s, respectively.The process of internationalization of Swedish enterprises, liberal approaches to economic cooperation with foreign countries and the recovery of public finances, whose dynamic development took place in the 1990s, are the second characteristic period in Swedens economic policy. For more than two decades, Swedish governments have maintained strong fiscal discipline. After theeconomic reset in the early 1990s, the general downward trend in the share of public spending in Swedish GDP seems to have come to a halt. In the last 3 years (20192021), public spending did not exceed 50% of GDP. Moreover, Sweden has maintained a low level of public debt for years. The ratio of public debt to GDP decreased from 78% (1994) to 35.2% (2019), 39.6% in 2020 and in 2021 36.7%. One of the important factors enabling the rapid economic growth of Sweden was high expenditure on research and development (R&D). For several years, Sweden has been at the forefront of countries investing the most in the development of new technologies. An important factor in Swedens economic growth has also been the high level of foreign investment. According to UN statistics, Sweden is one of the most attractive places to invest foreign capital. The impulse of the Swedish economy over many years was the development of exports, which in 2021 reached the level of approx. PLN 176 billion. Euro, which puts Sweden at the forefront of the world. The share of exports in creating the Swedish GDP in 2021 was as much as 45.5%.The EU membership also had a positive impact on Swedens economic development.Swedens social and economic success has also been achieved on the basis of the lessons learned from the financial crisis of the early 1990s. The unchanging strategy and economic policy, together with competitiveness, innovation and a flexible approach to trade, have made Sweden today a highly competitive country with an economy that achieves measurable successes.

Marxism and Homosexual Liberation

Abstract The decriminalisation of homosexuality was a measure originally adopted by the bourgeois revolutions, which was abandoned by the bourgeois parties as the rise of the labour movement led the bourgeoisie to seek a compromise with landlords, clergy and monarchy in different countries. The demand to decriminalise homosexuality was therefore taken over by the Marxist workers’ parties, such as the Social-Democratic Party of Germany before the First World War and the Bolshevik Party in Russia after the Revolution of October 1917. This article outlines the cooperation between the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee led by Magnus Hirschfeld and Social Democracy to decriminalise homosexuality by removing Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code before the First World War. It also describes the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Russia under Lenin, with the adoption of the first Soviet Penal Code in June 1922, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s relations with prominent figures of the early Soviet government such as N.A. Semashko, the first People’s Commissar of Public Health, and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first People’s Commissar for Education. Those ties ceased with the Nazis’ rise to power in January 1933, which resulted in the destruction of the institutions created by Hirschfeld, such as the Institute for Sexual Science and the World League for Sexual Reform, while in the Soviet Union itself Stalin recriminalised homosexuality in March 1934, shortly before Hirschfeld’s death, linking homosexuality and fascism.

‘Sitting there and listening was one of the most important lessons I had to learn’: critical capacity building in youth participatory action research

ABSTRACT This work builds upon critical youth studies’ concern with capacity building in engaging young people as active agents for social change. This article analyses critical capacity building processes among young women engaged in youth participatory action research (YPAR) that sought to co-design a community sport programme in Melbourne, Australia. Participants included the first author, four young women (second to the fifth author), and a critical friend (sixth author). The experience of engaging young women in YPAR foregrounded significant capacity building such as: (a) learning to genuinely listen to young people in order to plan for change; (b) finding creative and flexible ways to build relationships; (c) learning to negotiate the messiness and uncertainty in the research process; and (d) improving problem-solving skills in order to listen and respond to young people in their community. This paper concludes by articulating how YPAR can potentialise the development of critical capacity building in youth studies, nurturing skills and knowledge linked with social justice, activism, and democracy, instead of instrumentalist and technocratic capacity-building models that focus on training and predefined practical skills.

Hungarian Emancipation as a Model Central European Expropriation: How Discourses of Serfdom Argued for Takings

ABSTRACT Due to the moral stakes involved, current scholarship on modern expropriation tends to separate nineteenth-century takings, such as emancipation, from twentieth-century ones, such as Aryanization. This article reconnects Central European expropriations across the fin de siècle by demonstrating how emancipation in Hungary served as a model for later takings. The main subject of this analysis is a press debate in upper Hungary (today’s Slovakia) in 1896, roughly fifty years after the Hungarian emancipation and fifty years before the Holocaust and the building of the Soviet Bloc. I show how Christian Socials, Political Antisemites, and Social Democrats in 1896 repurposed emancipation to further their own desired expropriations. This was a critical inner logic of the practice: because the case for emancipation had been persuasive, it now served to legitimate new expropriations. I then demonstrate how emancipatory discourse over the next half century helped to fuel a series of new takings in the area, including land reform, Aryanization, and socialist nationalization. Thus, socially-beneficial takings contributed to later, often criminal ones. Considering that one result of this dynamic was genocide, it behooves scholars to take seriously these linkages.

Wczesna działalność polskich komunistów w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Przypadek Daniela Elbauma

Early activity of Polish communists in the United States. The case of Daniel Elbaum In the article the author discusses the American period in the activity of Daniel Elbaum, worker organiser and communist, participant in the 1905 revolution, activist of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. After escaping from exile, in 1913 Elbaum went to the United States, where he became an activist in Polish socialist and then communist circles, campaigner for the separation of the Polish Section from the Socialist Party of America and its subsequent accession as a so-called language federation to the Communist Party USA, established in 1919. Elbaum was one of the founders of the Polish radical left in the USA. His activities in the context of the events taking place in America (explosion of political radicalism and repression against left-wing activists) first consisted in winning support for Polish communist circles, taking control of the Polish faction of the Socialist Party, then editing its periodical, Głos Robotniczy (Workers’ Voice), and participating, as a delegate from Michigan, in the founding convention of the Communist Party USA in Chicago in September 1919. Arrested in 1920 and threatened with deportation, Elbaum escaped from prison in March 1920, managing to get to Europe, where he continued his work as a communist activist. His career in the USA also illustrates the divisions among American socialists, growing role of immigrants among them and their gradual radicalisation, which eventually led to a split and the founding of the Communist Party USA.

The vision of ideological culture in contemporary Chinese education: preserving society and state (La perspectiva de la cultura ideológica en la educación china contemporánea: preservar la sociedad y el estado)

ABSTRACT Research intends to identify: features of ideological culture within China’s education sector; the most effective theory of ideology, capable of developing the individuals’ worldviews and values, revealing their civic-minded self-awareness; the dominant personality traits that can most effectively influence the moulding of civic-minded attitudes and social responsibility among China’s residents. This research project included an experiment conducted to determine the effectiveness of various theories of ideology in China’s education sector. As the experiment’s findings suggest, traditional Confucianism was identified as the most productive ideology (51.2%). The research findings may be used in the study of various ideologies, such as liberalism and neoliberalism, socialism, feminism, communism and social democracy, applicable to existing systems of ideological culture education in the globalization settings (within the context of pedagogical and psychotherapeutic activities, as well as in order to improve methods of teaching general subjects and education levels among students).

Germany: Political Developments and Data in 2022

AbstractAgainst the background of the Russian war on Ukraine, the new traffic light coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the Free Democrats (FDP) led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) called a new era (Zeitenwende) in German foreign and security policy. The discussions on military support for Ukraine significantly shaped public debate in Germany in 2022. While the Left Party and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) rejected arms deliveries, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) criticized the federal government for hesitating. In addition to the German presidential election that saw the re‐election of Frank‐Walter Steinmeier, there were four regional elections in Saarland, Schleswig‐Holstein, North Rhine‐Westphalia, and Lower Saxony.