this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Ask Palestinians what they have to say about how wonderful EU Social Democracy is. Ask Libyans the same, or Iraqi. Ask Algerians, murdered by the million in the 1960s, Burkinabe or Mali having their central bank in Paris what they think of France's social democracy. Ask Cubans or Syrians what they think of Obama's social democracy. Ask the immigrant field-labourers picking up the berries planted in Almería (Spain) that you eat in Sweden what they think of Social Democracy.
Ask the Greeks who elected the leftist party Syriza to government, only to have their state power removed by the Troika under threat of the European Central Bank to drop servicing of Greek state bonds. Ask the French who democratically elected a leftist coalition last elections and their president of the republic rejects to nominate a candidate for them. Or ask them what they think of Social "Democracy" when Macron declares emergency measures to skip the Parliament vote and implement an antidemocratic raise of the retirement age.
Ask the Spaniards what they think of Social Democracy when their police and ministry of interior manufactured false evidence of funding from Venezuela and Iran to the largest leftist party in the country at the time (Podemos) together with a media campaign to leak this "evidence", when 40% of the media are owned by fucking Silvio Berlusconi (burn in hell, fascist fuck).
Such wonderful "democracies" all of them, raising military expenditure collectively to 5% of GDP without any democratic input from society, all of them enacting exclusively austerity policy for the past 20 years of my life.
People my age (30ish) in Europe have NEVER seen anything other than austerity policy and the ever growing degradation of public services, growth in inequality, stagnation in economics, lowering of purchase power, raising of rent prices and lowering of home ownership rates, destruction of labor rights, and now the fucking raise of the far right all over the continent. In 4 years time, virtually all of the EU will be controlled by far right parties, who will be using the 5% GDP expenditures in weapons of "social democrats" for god knows what.
Tell me again how fucking wonderful this system is
Note how I said ideology, not party, I an not a super fan of how the current social democratic party has been handling things
So you hold separately the ideal of social democracy in your head from its actual implementation you see in the real world. Maybe you should consider how the fundamentals of social democracy might just naturally lead to the problems you see with the current social democratic party.
A lot of communists online do the same thing you're doing; not reconciling the ideal they have in their head with the actual implementation in reality. Just like how there are fundamental problems with Marxist theory that result in attempts to implement it devolving into authoritarianism (centralised state power, vangaurdism, "dictatorship of the proletariat", cults of personality, etc.), there are fundamental problems with social democracy that result in flaws in its implementation (weak/shallow analysis of power dynamics, reliance on imperialism/colonialism in the form of unequal exchange, regulatory capture, influence of money in politics, etc.)
Generally, as long as the economic system allows wealth to be converted to political power (as in the case of social democracy), or the political system allows political power to be converted to wealth (as in the case of centralized state communism), there will be corruption that eventually snowballs into major issues that cannot be solved by working within the same system.
Drop the condecending tone.
I am well aware of how the social democratic party has shifted their politics away from the social democratic ideology.
That does not change the ideology, it just re enforces the need to put stronger protections of government run companies.
I didn't intend to sound condescending, I just come across that way sometimes. I am just of the opinion that stronger protections are only a temporary fix because the capitalist economic system eventually erodes any protections you could possibly make, and I believe that is a fundamental flaw in the ideology of social democracy. Not to mention that preserving capitalism also preserves a system of exploitation that extends beyond the borders of the social democratic society and generates wealth for the in-group at the expense of the out-group.
Edit: I want to add that this isn't just speculation, it happens repeatedly throughout history. We actually had a social democratic government in the US under FDR, and it had enormous economic and social benefits, but it ultimately failed to curtail the power of big business and was rolled back. That's why I say - no half measures. Capitalism must be destroyed entirely or it will inevitably become the dominant power system in a society.