‚Social Policy‘ vs.

Socialist Reforms:
The Significance of Bismarck‘s
Alternative to the Rising SPD Today
FRIEDER OTTO WOLF
BERLIN
 CLAIMS

• To make existing historical analysis relevant for present debates on political strategies of
liberation
• To contribute to a renewal of a critical continuation of the liberation struggle of the old labour
movement
• To concretize the possibilities of contribution of a ‚finite marxism‘, conscious of ist own specific
capabilities and limitations

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 Class Politics from above - and class politics from
below
- The distinction to be elaborated
- The ‚fordist‘ class-compromise
- The underlying elementary illusion
- Re-emerging class-struggle
- Countering neo-liberal strategies of marketization

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New problems of capitalist class domination – and new
ways to reproduce it

- New problems of class struggle

- Old and new ‚individualisms‘
- A return of the politics of labour
- Neoliberal vs. Bismarckian strategies of class struggle from
above
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 The present situation and its perspectives, 1

- General results of the recent debate:

+ no automatic reversal of the neo-liberal
transformation of social policyS
+ need to re-define class-struggle
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 The present situation and its perspectives, 2

- Middle term perspectives

+ no way back
+ ‚meta-stabilization‘
+ trade union and social movement politics and
political parties
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 The present situation and its perspectives, 3

• A new ‚translation of theory into practice‘

+ the problem of the ‚concrete analysis of the concrete situation‘
+ the challenge of overcoming the ‚stalinist deformation‘
+ a new strategic deliberation
+ plurality of political subjects and the need for a common analysis
of experience and common strategy-building
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