Workers and the “Golden Age” of Social Democracy? An Introduction

Berger, Stefan; Fink, Leon; de Graaf, Jan; Dixon, Patrick

doi:10.1215/15476715-11521350

Notions of a “golden age of social democracy” have dominated the historical perspective on the immediate postwar decades, most often envisaged as a period stretching from 1945 to the oil crisis of 1973. To take a prime example, Eric Hobsbawm’s influential Age of Extremes endorsed this interpretation, linking it tightly to the history of the Cold War.^¹ According to him, the taming of capitalism in the years after World War II had much to do with the presence of a global enemy: communism. Especially under the conditions of the postwar boom years (i.e., strong economic growth and full employment),^² capitalism could show a friendly face and allow workers to have a share in the immense wealth produced by it. Others have emphasized how an emerging Keynesian consensus among economists further contributed to the emergence of a capitalist West that was not only politically democratic but also allowed for various forms of workplace democracy and the creation of welfare states.^³

It was a social democratic age not so much because social democratic parties were necessarily in power when major welfare and democracy reforms were implemented.^⁴ Other political parties, including Christian democratic and conservative parties, shared, at least to a degree, the belief in a welfare capitalism benefiting not only the few, but the great many. Undoubtedly, these postwar reforms went furthest where they were pushed by powerful social democratic parties, as in Britain, Sweden (where these tendencies had already started in the 1930s), or Norway.^⁵ There was, however, a social democratic consensus or moment within mainstream politics in virtually all Western democracies from the second half of the 1940s to the 1970s. Their representatives could argue that workers never had it so good and therefore had no need to listen to the siren songs of international communism, especially as it was not difficult to see that communism struggled to achieve similar levels of both mass consumption and democracy than the capitalist West.

The building blocks of a golden age of social democracy were thus always part of the ideological construction project of a liberal capitalist West. They were legitimating capitalism’s economic, social, and political order vis-à-vis the alternative in the Cold War, communism. They were ignoring or sidelining remaining cases of social injustice and pockets of poverty as well as huge social inequalities that persisted, to varying degrees, in all democratic welfare capitalist societies. How rich you were and how educated you were, and where you ended up on the social ladder, continued to depend to a very large extent on how rich and educated your parents had been. In the 1960s and 1970s the educational systems in Western Europe and North America became more porous for a brief period, and the phenomenon of social advancement became a prominent one, but in all Western societies at the end of this period we can also observe a renewed closing of these windows of opportunities for children of the working classes to advance socially and step out of their class.^⁶

With the end of the long economic boom and the emergence of repeated economic crises after 1973, capitalism’s face became less humane, and its new ideology, neoliberalism, justified cuts to the welfare state and to all forms of public spending on behalf of those not privileged in society.^⁷ Social engineering, state intervention on behalf of the disadvantaged, a solidaristic society, planning, and public ownership all became dirty words in the neoliberal dictionary. Individual agency and merit, the family, free enterprise, technology, and the market were among the values espoused by the new ideology. After the fall of communism, when liberal capitalism stood at its most triumphant, an increasingly global capitalism under the hegemony of neoliberalism put profit before people, shareholder value before the interest of workers, and egotistical individual or group interest before notions of community and solidarity. This development of capitalism had serious repercussions also on the state of democracy in the liberal West, eroding the very foundations of democratic governance.^⁸

Recurring crises of capitalism since then (e.g., the banking crisis of 2007–8) have put a question mark behind this triumph,^⁹ but it has not significantly destabilized the economic system that now rules the world. Capitalist crises have, however, brought renewed calls for reining in or re-embedding capitalism. The memory of a golden age of social democracy, some on the left argued, had to be rediscovered. Anti-globalization movements have joined forces with trade union movements and political parties to bring about “movement parties” that are united in their desire to “re-embed” capitalism or transform it.^¹⁰ The popularity of left-wing populism in various parts of the world, from Bernie Sanders’s campaigns in the US primary elections for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016 and 2020 to new left-wing parties in Europe (e.g., Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and Die Linke in Germany) underline this rediscovery of an alleged golden age of social democracy on the left of the political spectrum.^¹¹ Here it has become a positive “realm of memory,”^¹² used widely as a resource for attracting voters. However, it has also been adapted by right-wing populist parties and movements, even though their political orientation is often neoliberal. Yet, largely for propagandistic reasons, they attempted to appeal to the memory of a social democratic golden age, arguing that now it is no longer the left, but instead right-wing populism, that is looking after the interests of the ordinary people.^¹³ Hence, the legacy of the postwar social democratic moment is a contested one.

Both its historiographical construction and its contemporary topicality make it interesting to reexamine that trope of a golden age of social democracy. Any such reexamination should, however, start with conceding the Western-centric origins of the idea itself. The social democratic moment was one that happened, above all, in the industrially advanced capitalist economies of the Global North (including Australia and New Zealand), beginning in Sweden as early as the first half of the twentieth century.^¹⁴ Much of the Global South identifies the period after the end of World War II with decolonization, when powerful anticolonial movements, rooted in the first half of the twentieth century, achieved independence, either peacefully or through a series of often extremely brutal anticolonial wars.^¹⁵ Many, if by no means all, anticolonial movements were supported by the communist world that incorporated anti-imperialism into its arsenal of weapons with which to charge, combat, and hopefully defeat the capitalist world. The rhetorical and, above all, practical support it lent to anticolonial movements made it popular in the Global South,^¹⁶ where the Cold War was characterized by a series of substitute wars between an alliance of liberal capitalist states led by the United States and an alliance of communist states led by the USSR.

Hence, many of the countries that won independence in the post–World War II years sided with the Soviet Union and developed variants of authoritarian communism. Those who did not allied with the Global West, receiving generous development aid but struggling with corruption and authoritarian elites more interested in enriching themselves than in serving their people. Everywhere in the Global South, communist or capitalist, independence regimes followed the logic of development thinking that becoming like the countries of the Global North would be the way toward enjoying the wealth of the nations of the Global North.^¹⁷ However, the idea of “catching up” with the Global North was hampered by continuing dependence on multinational companies from the Global North and by an ongoing colonial-style exploitation of the countries in the Global South, where large profits were ending up in the pockets of multinationals rather than in the pockets of the people of these countries.^¹⁸ Liberal capitalism, in its global struggle against communism, aligned itself with a range of dictatorial regimes that violently repressed left-wing activists in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.^¹⁹ Liberal capitalism was thus perfectly able to show, during the Cold War, two very different faces: a humane one in the Global North and an inhumane one in the Global South. Once again, we can observe how inadequate Western terms and concepts are when we speak about the non-Western world—something that global labor history has long pointed out.^²⁰ To what extent notions of a golden age are at all relevant for the Global South is a question that remains largely under-researched, as the trope has been used very largely only in connection with the Global North.

This lacuna, alongside the above-mentioned historiographical construction and its current topicality, brought Leon Fink and Stefan Berger to think about organizing a major international conference on the theme of the golden age of social democracy. They were successful in finding the support of their co-organizers of the conference, Patrick Dixon and Jan de Graaf. And they won the support of two prominent organizations of US and German labor history: the Labor and Working-Class History Association, with its journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, of which Fink was the senior editor at the time; and the German Labour History Association, of which Berger is the chair. Financial support for the conference was won from the Thyssen Foundation, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the journal Labor, and the Institute for Social Movements (ISB) at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, of which Berger is the director. The conference was held at the ISB in Bochum in April 2023. Subsequently, the four organizers of the conference decided to assemble some of the papers that were held there into three related special issues of labor journals: one for Labor (22, no. 1 [2025]), edited now by Julie Greene; and two in Moving the Social: Journal for Social History and the History of Social Movements (76 [2025] and 77 [2026]), the journal of the ISB, coedited by Berger and Sean Scalmer from the University of Melbourne.

Several concerns related to the theme of a golden age of social democracy are covered in the three interrelated journal issues. First, there is the immediate impact of World War II on labor unions and workers’ living standards across the United States, both Western and Eastern Europe, Australia / New Zealand, Japan, and Brazil. Equal to the focus on worker power, questions of democracy and worker voice—or the theme of working-class agency and its limits—receive prime attention. Even as workplace “industrial democracy” and “liberal” (in New Deal terms) or self-consciously secular “labor” or “social democratic” political strategies are recognized as Western political norms in this era, the scholarship represented here also emphasizes the influence of forms of arbitration, social Catholicism, and “corporatism” in shaping state policies. Another important development in the postwar world was the increasing feminization of the labor force across the industrially advanced countries of the Global North. How women themselves—both within and outside official labor movements—reckoned with structural and cultural barriers to full social participation is the subject of several inquiries. Finally, the Cold War itself—and the perceived threat of communism—continues to draw scrutiny both as a central feature of postwar international labor relations and as a source of conflict within national labor movements.

From the twenty-five presentations offered at the conference, Labor is proud to offer a forum for six original and innovative essays touching on the “golden age” conference theme. Two labor historians first address certain peculiarities of the US postwar political economy. Nelson Lichtenstein argues that both American and German labor leaders self-consciously drew on each other’s experience of depression and wartime conditions to fashion distinctive systems of labor-management relations. Indeed, he suggests, the United States might well have veered toward a more German-like corporatist system of state-employer-worker trade-offs had not US management proved so recalcitrant. Aside from laying a scaffolding for worker rights to representation, American postwar liberals, as Andrew Elrod documents, were preoccupied with the problem of the wage-price spiral. Yet from Truman to Kennedy to Johnson to Carter—as indeed to this very day—inflationary pressures, and especially price rises undermining workers’ standard of living, have proven largely impervious to liberal economic policy redress. Against the grain of “whiggish” treatments celebrating themes of contemporary opportunity and liberation for postwar workers, Jan de Graaf cautions that the very power of working-class movements exercised a conservative and a restraining disciplinary influence within both East and West European societies. Eloisa Betti offers a similarly sober perspective on gendered labor relations in postwar Italy. In the 1950s, as she documents, the spread of highly feminized and unstable forms of work such as industrial home-based work as well as precarious jobs highlighted the dark side of an era of Fordist mass production and spreading democracy. By contrast, Stefan Müller looks in depth at what we might consider the ideological apex of social democracy’s golden age—a particular West German program, implemented in the 1970s and aimed at both modernizing and humanizing the industrial workplace. Finally, in a wide-ranging and synthetic essay covering both Western Europe and the Americas, Gerd-Rainer Horn offers an appreciative, revisionist account of the contributions of social Catholicism to the most progressive political moments of the postwar period.

Overall, the three special issues that are derived from the conference give us a rich and evocative panoply of ideas surrounding the notion of a golden age of social democracy in the three decades after the end of World War II. They also raise the intriguing question of a connection between the social democratic age and neoliberalism. The contributions assembled here seem to confirm that the trope of a golden age of social democracy was always more fitting to the Global North than the Global South and that even within the Global North it was very uneven. They also confirm the importance of the Cold War in constructions of a golden age, making it a powerful resource for liberal capitalism at times of crisis. Yet many of the articles leave us with an impression that the construction of a social democratic golden age, based on ideas of solidarity and social justice, has also been something that democrats of different persuasions have been striving for continuously. These attempts have indeed produced some significant results, at least within the industrially advanced nations of the Global North, and especially in the postwar decades that are the focus of examination here. Such real advances in the erosion of social inequalities would also explain why it has become such a powerful “realm of memory” in contemporary politics.