Parliamentary social¬ism, as a form of politics seeking to achieve a restruc¬turing of society and a partial transfer of power from the ruling classes to the working classes by peaceful means, has its intellectual roots in the works of Marx and Engels. In advanced capitalist countries, social democracy emerged as a variant of the nineteenth century political alternatives of conservatism and liberalism, its energies fuelled by the ris¬ing class consciousness of the Working class and its trade union organizations. Towards the end of his life, Marx had begun to conceive the possibi¬lity (if not probability) of a social revolution taking place through a transformation of parliamentary majority in a society in which a highly deve¬loped bourgeois culture per-mitted untrammelled freedom to the electorate to change its political masters from time to time.
Jan-Feb 1984, volume 8, No 4