Social democracy made the state police the working class it claimed to represent.

Evidence

It is important to understand why Labourist social democracy was vulnerable to the charge of “statism”—and therefore why “anti-statism” has proved so powerful a populist slogan: otherwise, we may confuse ourselves into believing that the headway which “Thatcherism” is undoubtedly making among working people, committed Labour voters and some sectors of skilled labor, can be wholly attributed to “false consciousness.” As we have seen, the project which social-democratic corporatism set itself was the containment and reform, not the transformation, of the crisis of British capitalism. What capital manifestly could no longer accomplish on its own, “reformism” would have to do by harnessing capital to the state, using the state as representative of the “general interest” to create the conditions for the effective resumption of capitalist accumulation and profitability. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1115 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Labour’s statist strategy forced it to police its own working-class base (similarity 0.85)
• Labour’s statism has always avoided popular democratic mobilization (similarity 0.82)
• Statism without popular mobilization is intrinsic to Labour’s Fabian heritage (similarity 0.81)
• Labour’s corporatist crisis management disorganized working-class resistance to the crisis (similarity 0.79)
• Labour governments functioned as crisis managers who fragmented working-class resistance (similarity 0.79)
• Social democracy’s contradictions, not capital alone, opened the terrain for Thatcherism (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Labour’s statist strategy forced it to police its own working-class base #corroborates (0.80)
• Working-class movements accommodated capitalism while theory idealized a revolutionary proletariat #expands (0.60)
• Social democracy chose containment over transformation of capitalism’s crisis. #expands (0.55) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1115
• Labour’s representation of the working class actively constitutes that class #exemplifies (0.50)