Addressing Social-Democracy VS Marxism

    First, let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way, you can’t compare Marxism and Social Democracy, one is a materialist analysis of history focused on class struggle, and a critique of political economy - by marxism people usually meant socialism or communism, and social democracy is a ‘mixed economy. Social democracies are meant to mitigate inequalities created by capitalism, by using a system of progressive taxation and social benefits. Sure social democracies have improved material conditions for the working class when compared to free-market capitalism, the NHS is a good example of this. Though even after accounting for imperialism and exploitation of the global south that they heavily rely on, there are significant problems that remain with social democracies. 

    Secondly, the mechanisms in capitalist economies have a tendency to generate gross inequalities of income, wealth and opportunities. Since most of the wealth is generational, you can't really redistribute it with income tax. Inheritance tax exists, but it's not a good, final solution either. Social democracies have generally failed at addressing these problems. Only a radical change in the mode of distribution of personal incomes, socialism, offers a real chance of eliminating that income inequality. 

    Then, the idea of a mixed economy is problematic. In those that have existed, the socialistic elements have remained ‘subordinated’ to the capitalist elements. Like the commodity and wage forms that have remained core parts of the production process. the working class also remains subordinated to the bourgeoisie, class antagonisms don't magically go away with reform. These social safety nets had to be financed out of tax revenue extracted from the private sector, which meant that the opportunities for expansion of ‘welfare’ measures and the ‘free’ distribution of basic services have been dependent on the health of that private sector. Only when the capitalist sector has been growing strongly have social democratic governments been able to deliver on their promises. In that way, social-democrats are extremely limited in what they can achieve: their own attempts at redistributing threaten to destroy the capitalist extraction of wealth which they themselves depend on

    Western social democrats have no coherent idea of what planned and non-commodity forms of production are ultimately about, and how their problems can be addressed. Rejecting the planification of an economy and the dismantling of capitalism beyond basic social reform is pretty silly in my humble opinion.

 Finally, since they mostly popped up under threat of a communist revolution when the USSR became a prominent power, we now see them rolling out austerity measures and slowly dismantling social safety nets, for the gains of capitalists. Reform can be a good thing, but it can also quickly be withdrawn.