For example many CPSU members were formally members of the social democratic party, almost all Eastern Bloc communist parties were mergers of the preexisting communist parties with social democratic parties, and the Korean Social Democratic Party is one of the few opposition parties in the DPRK
Social Democracy is what all the socialists called themselves. Then in WWI the SocDems betrayed the international proletariat and supported their own states’ armies, so Lenin switched to calling his people communists like Marx intended. Also the German SPD used to be one of the more progressive parties, but they were revisionist and the principled communists split and led a revolution, but were defeated by the SPD making way for Hitler.
Why did Socialist Unity Party of Germany merge with post-WW2 SPD then?
It was not voluntary.
Please explain
The man in your pfp used the power of violence to crush fascism and try to fold the sucdems into actual socialists. Didn’t work, sadly.
Idk, I’m not an expert, just giving some basic explanation for the relation of Social Democracy and Communism.
That claim was made by Comrade Stalin in 1924, a decade before the rise of fascism in Germany. The assessment turned out to be unhelpful and Stalin himself abandoned this theory. In 1935 the Comintern changed from the “social fascism” to the “popular front” theory.
Did the social democrats not fight against fascism hard enough? Yes. Are they our political enemy because they support capitalism? In the grand narrative yes, but for specific goals in the near future inside bourgeois states, likely not. Does that make them fascists? No. If supporting capitalism makes them fascists, any other ideology besides communism would be fascist and the word would lose its meaning.
Pontificating about the true nature of one group or another is idealism. Look at the material goal you have at hand, the concrete thing your org is trying to accomplish right now, and see who will be for or against you. It is idealism to do otherwise. Just because social democrats in general don’t want to kill landlords does not mean specific people who call themselves socdems won’t join a tenants union. You judge people individually, you assess their motives and resolve individually, you do the same for specific organiztions, and you see how they fall in terms of power and alignment for the specific goal you have.
Social democracy is not really the moderate wing of fascism. They have a history of collaboration with fascists, but they also have a history of fighting against them. It is best to think of social democrats are not being grounded enough in theory and historical experience to be consistent allies, and are vulnerable to being co-opted.
These days, calling social democracy the moderate wing of fascism is mostly a matter of insulting them (justifiably so). Especially since modern western social democrats have become full throated imperialists, and rarely even fight for workers rights anymore.
Sorry but your second paragraph seems at odds with your first. In my experience Social Democrats are pro-capitalism, which makes them no allies of Communists.
There’s a bit of a time and geography issue at play here. Modern Social democrats in the imperial core have become completely useless, and fascist adjacent in many cases, but Social democrats in the developing countries and during the early 20th century were much better. People who call themselves “left” or “social democrats” do not actually form a unified bloc with similar ideologies unfortunately, which makes calling all social democrats as moderate fascists even less applicable.
like others have said, social democrats and communists have a shared history due to word choice. the Bolsheviks (russian social democratic labor party) called their party that after imitating the success of the SPD, social democrat basically was the same as communist in the 19th century, but communist was more associated with 1848/1870 than the SPD. Lenin like others said, brought back the term to counter the revisionist SPD treachery in 1914.
