Confronting Capitalism: The Golden Age of Social Democracy
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After World War II, political parties championing redistribution, full employment, and egalitarianism gained power across the globe, especially in Western Europe. But why did these social democrats give up the ambition to transition to socialism?
In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber explains why the golden age of capitalism was a rare period of triumph for the Left, even though the movement faced serious challenges from class enemies, state structures, and tensions within its own coalition. Any leftist trying to change the balance of class power would benefit from understanding why social democracy achieved such lasting success even as it remains in the political minority today.
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Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. Music by Zonkey.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Confronting Capitalism. |
| 0:19.3 | I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chipper, a professor of sociology at NYU |
| 0:25.0 | and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy. |
| 0:29.0 | Quick reminder before we get into our discussion, if you have any questions for Vivek, |
| 0:33.6 | you can send us an email at confronting.capitalism at jacobin.com. |
| 0:40.6 | How are you doing today, V? |
| 0:42.1 | Good. |
| 0:42.7 | It's our last episode before Christmas. |
| 0:44.7 | So I guess that's significant. |
| 0:46.8 | Yeah. |
| 0:47.2 | And that's why today we're talking about how to put the Christ back in Christmas, right? |
| 0:51.1 | Yes. |
| 0:52.0 | Yep, I've been thumping the table for this one for a long time. |
| 0:56.4 | See, Fox News? |
| 0:57.6 | It's not just you. |
| 0:58.4 | We can do it too. |
| 0:59.8 | No, today we're going to be talking about social democracy, and this is the second |
| 1:04.8 | episode in our series on social democracy. |
| 1:08.6 | Last episode, we talked about social democracy in more broad terms as this |
| 1:14.9 | decades-long project to pursue political power through the state on behalf of the working class. |
| 1:20.3 | On this episode, we're going to focus on the post-war period when social democratic parties were |
| 1:25.9 | at the height of their power, in particular in Europe, which we'll talk about a lot, but also throughout the globe, there was this big project of using the state to try to even out some of the rougher edges of capitalism, and that took a lot of different forms in different places. |
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