The Social Democratic Party of Germany—the SPD—is 163 years old. At the tender age of 113, in 1976, this venerable institution experienced a reform attempt that was both fundamental and ultimately inconsequential.
Within the SPD, a current emerged that sought to provide the party with a new philosophical foundation. Marxism was to be replaced—or at least substantially challenged—by “Critical Rationalism”. The personal relationship between then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the founder of Critical Rationalism, Karl Popper, played no small role in this development.
The goal was ambitious: to transform the SPD into a party of “creative reformism”—reform-oriented, skeptical of ideology, intellectually modern. The remaining relics from the socialist attic were to be discarded once and for all. Critical Rationalism emphasized the rejection of dogmatic certainty, the falsifiability of theories, and an open, self-correcting attitude in science and politics alike.
Popper’s wartime work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, written during his exile in New Zealand, has long since become not merely a foundational text of political philosophy, but one of the central intellectual pillars of the modern Western order. Yet the SPD’s reform failed.
There were seminars, publications, internal debates and conferences. Then came the slow fading-away typical of intellectual projects that never truly penetrate the emotional core of a political movement. The SPD did not like Popper, and it could not bring itself to let go of Marx.
The SPD did not like Popper, and it could not bring itself to let go of Marx.
And yet “Critical Rationalism” could hardly have been a better fit for the SPD. Back in 1959, under the influence of figures such as Schmidt himself, the party leadership had adopted the “Godesberg Program”, abandoning Marxist orthodoxy on class struggle and embracing political pragmatism. That shift paved the party’s road into government and eventually into the comforts of power.
Critical Rationalism could have closed the widening gap between the SPD’s theory and its actual practice. But the party refused. To this day, it continues to live with that contradiction—awkwardly, resentfully and increasingly unsuccessfully.
In contrast, the Austrian Social Democratic Party had moved much further along the path of scientific and philosophical modernization. But Catholic Austria had never quite known what to do with Hegel, whose influence on Marx was decisive.
Even before the First World War, the Austrian Social Democrats flirted with supplementing or replacing Hegelian-Marxist orthodoxy with neo-Kantian and positivist ideas—much to the irritation of Vladimir Lenin, who fiercely attacked “empiro-criticism” in 1909.
By the 1920s, Vienna had become home to the famous Vienna Circle, a powerful network of neo-positivist thinkers whose left wing influenced Austrian Social Democracy significantly. Austro-Marxism became a curious synthesis of Marxism, neo-Kantian epistemology and empirical social science. Anti-dogmatism, scientific rigor, hostility to metaphysics, and empirically grounded social analysis all became part of its intellectual culture.
In hindsight one can clearly see the Austrians’ kinship with later Critical Rationalism. But even in Austria, the reform did not endure.
Today, the Social Democratic Part of Austria, the SPÖ, is led by Andreas Babler, a left-wing populist whose rhetoric mixes class-war nostalgia with revolutionary romanticism. Since his rise during the SPÖ’s internal crisis in 2023, tensions within the party leadership have steadily intensified, not least because Babler himself performs disastrously with the broader electorate. How this will all end remains unknown.
Today, the Social Democratic Part of Austria, the SPÖ, is led by Andreas Babler, a left-wing populist whose rhetoric mixes class-war nostalgia with revolutionary romanticism.
In Germany, theorists tend to overestimate the importance of their theories. Political parties do not collapse overnight simply because their intellectual foundations are incoherent. Contradictions can persist for decades. But eventually they do begin to corrode the structure from within.
Every ideological party contains a nearly insoluble contradiction, and the more a party is driven by a worldview, the stronger the contradiction becomes. The SPD is perhaps the clearest German example.
On paper, the arrangement is simple enough: the party base supports the leadership because the leadership promises to represent the interests of the base. A small group gains power and privilege, while in exchange it is expected to advance the interests of ordinary members. Elegant in theory. Less so in reality.
Political parties—especially ideological ones—do not function as purely rational vehicles of interest representation. The SPD was never merely an organization. It was also a feeling. It possessed a sensitive political “soul” constantly in need of emotional reassurance. Its irrational components have always been underestimated precisely because they resist scientific analysis.
The SPD was never merely an organization. It was also a feeling. It possessed a sensitive political “soul” constantly in need of emotional reassurance.
Had the SPD truly behaved according to the rational-actor model beloved by political scientists, its rank and file would likely have welcomed the transition toward Critical Rationalism. After all, by 1976 the era of socialist utopias was long over—or so one might have thought.
But emotional traditions die slowly. In 1988, only two years before it emerged that he had been a Stasi informant, songwriter and later Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht member Diether Dehm was commissioned by the SPD leadership to compose a new official party anthem for the party’s 125th anniversary. The song, “Soft Water Breaks the Stone”, was meant to emotionally mobilize the faithful. Dehm recycled an older composition previously popularized by the Dutch band Bots—a song that instinctively combined the traditions of German pub singalongs with sentimental socialist lyricism. Yet the anthem was a damp squib. Before long, the SPD returned to its true emotional homeland: the revolutionary anthem “The Internationale”.
The cultural critic Gerhard Henschel once remarked that almost the entire cultural production of the left could be categorized as kitsch. Few places demonstrate the limits of rational political theory more mercilessly than the cultural underworld of the SPD.
The cultural critic Gerhard Henschel once remarked that almost the entire cultural production of the left could be categorized as kitsch.
This is precisely why theory-based reforms so often remain sterile intellectual exercises. They rarely penetrate the deeper cultural layers of party identity.
Already in the 1890s, under the influence of reformers such as Eduard Bernstein, the SPD had begun its gradual departure from revolutionary Marxism. Yet even today, many ordinary party members remain emotionally attached to revolutionary folklore.
In Frankfurt’s radical left-wing daycare collectives of the 1970s, “revisionist” was still used as a term of abuse. Apparently, no socialist movement can entirely survive without mythological remnants.
Ironically, Marx himself famously declared “I am not a Marxist”. Friedrich Engels saw Marx’s work as “scientific socialism”, opposed to the dreamy irrationalism of the utopian socialists. They lost that battle.
Scientific, anti-dogmatic, falsification-oriented tendencies remained rare exceptions throughout the history of socialist movements—including the SPD. Again and again, intellectual reform collided with the party’s deeper ideological and quasi-religious instincts. Indeed, one cannot truly understand German Social Democracy without borrowing concepts from the psychology of religion.
Again and again, intellectual reform collided with the party’s deeper ideological and quasi-religious instincts.
The average party loyalist resembles a believer more than a rational actor. There are party rituals, party saints, party commandments, a party language, even a party morality. And like all believers in an orthodoxy, the faithful party soldier sees heresy everywhere. Revisionism appears not as adaptation to reality, but as betrayal.
The Austrian revisionist Friedrich Adler—who once argued that Marx should be supplemented with Kant—nevertheless assassinated Austrian Prime Minister Karl Stürgkh in 1916, in what he called an “attack against the First World War”. So much for the moderation of revisionists.
All of this would be merely an interesting historical curiosity if the irrational side of the SPD remained confined within manageable boundaries. But it does not.
The real disaster began once the party’s traditional social base started to dissolve. The SPD had always understood itself as the political representative of industrial workers. As that milieu eroded, the party lost not only voters but its historical purpose. Unlike the Bavarian conservative party, the CSU, which still draws strength from Bavarian regional identity, or Die Linke, which feeds on East German protest culture, the SPD has seen its core constituency disintegrate almost completely.
Membership collapsed from over one million in the 1970s to fewer than 400,000 today. The electorate aged. Election results deteriorated steadily. Into the resulting ideological vacuum marched entirely new social milieus.
Beginning around the turn of the millennium, identity politics spread rapidly through German universities. Distorted fragments of “woke” ideology found especially fertile ground among generations of humanities and social-science students less distinguished by intellectual discipline than by a peculiar blend of moral self-righteousness and ambitions towards discursive leverage—and power.
The new ideological paradigm harmonized perfectly with declining academic standards—themselves partly the result of decades of well-intentioned but disastrous educational reforms. And the new politics offered one enormous practical advantage: it was cheap.
Renaming streets, creating “hate speech” reporting portals, policing language, administratively redefining gender—all of this is vastly easier than building affordable housing, reforming the welfare state, or repairing the healthcare system. For ambitious bureaucrats, it is paradise.
Creating “hate speech” reporting portals is vastly easier than building affordable housing.
Liberalism, now inconvenient, was discarded with surprising ease. Deep down, many in the party had never truly believed in it anyway.
The SPD has always possessed a weakness for simplistic moral narratives. Traditionally the leadership’s task was to contain, redirect or instrumentalize these impulses. Which makes it mildly amusing when the SPD accuses others of populism.
Can a worldview party such as the SPD function without a certain degree of Manichaean thinking? One may doubt it. Thus its love of moralistic politics and what Pierre Bourdieu once described as the “popular idealization of the lower classes”. The uncomfortable truth is that the SPD was never merely a party of interests. It was also a party of ressentiment. Perhaps all parties are.
The difference is that the SPD once channeled these instincts toward something socially useful. For decades, it functioned as a corrective against the permanent temptation of social cruelty disguised as economic virtue. It restrained more dangerous revolutionary impulses while simultaneously pushing society toward gradual reform. It was the party of evolutionary progress. That, above all, was what attracted Popper.
The SPD functioned as a corrective against the permanent temptation of social cruelty disguised as economic virtue. For a very long time, the party lived off that moral capital. That inheritance has now been squandered.
In the early Federal Republic, this role was almost unique. During the Weimar Republic, the SPD stood among the heroic defenders of democracy. For a very long time, the party lived off that moral capital. That inheritance has now been squandered.
Most liberals have long since abandoned a party that increasingly resembles a grotesque caricature of itself—a party whose authoritarian functionaries would almost certainly have been regarded by Popper not as defenders, but as gravediggers of the open society.
