Ainda a social-democracia?: rediscutindo e aplicando o conceito a partidos competitivos da América do Sul e da Europa

Abstract

Political science uses to interpret social democracy as moderateness, adhesion to capitalism and only residual differences from market capitalism. This dissertation develops another definition, based on Kautsky and Bernstein s ideas, with two key elements: the central importance of parliamentary and representative democracy and the acknowledgement that there are constraints to advance in social transformation. The gradual reformism that derives from that is the means by which social democratic parties seek do advance towards socialism, by promoting decommodification and strengthening labour vis-à-vis capital. There is a tension inside social democratic parties between Bernsteinian pragmatism and Kautskyian purism. It avoids that social democracy moves itself to one of both extremes and, then, detracts from its character, either having electoral victories as a single concern or turning itself into a ghetto party. Going as far as possible and fighting for changing the constraints require a confrontation with the hegemony of commodification; therefore, it is not enough to move toward the ideological centre in order to win elections. Then, the concept is applied to six competitive parties and their governments, three of them from South America and the others from Europe. The goals are to check if they have played as far as the constraints allowed and if they have tried to change those limits, and also to identify the effect of intraparty dynamics over decision-making. It is analyzed how the different constraints in each case affect how the parties play. The six cases studied are Social Democratic Labour Party (SAP) from Sweden, the Norwegian Labour Party (DNA), the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) from Bolivia, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), the Workers' Party (PT) from Brazil, and the Broad Front (FA) from Uruguay. MAS rises as the most clear-cut example of social democracy, contradicting stereotyped views concerning the party. PSOE is the best example of a party which has not advanced as far as possible. The neoliberal bias in the European Union works as a constraint to a socialist advancement inside the countries of that continent, whereas innovations adopted by South American parties points out to the survival of social democracy in this age of integrated markets.