Social Democracy

political ideology that advocates a peaceful, evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes.
Based on 19th-century socialism and the tenets of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
social democracy shares common ideological roots with communism
but eschews its militancy and totalitarianism.
Social democracy was originally known as revisionism because it represented a change in basic Marxist doctrine,
primarily in the former's repudiation of the use of revolution to establish a socialist society.

August Bebel imbued social democracy with the belief that socialism must be installed through lawful means rather than by force.

In his Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (1899; “The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy”; Eng. trans. Evolutionary Socialism), Bernstein challenged the Marxist orthodoxy that capitalism was doomed, pointing out that capitalism was overcoming many of its weaknesses, such as unemployment, overproduction, and the inequitable distribution of wealth. Ownership of industry was becoming more widely diffused, rather than more concentrated in the hands of a few. Whereas Marx had declared that the subjugation of the working class would inevitably culminate in socialist revolution, Bernstein argued that success for socialism depended not on the continued and intensifying misery of the working class but rather on eliminating that misery. He further noted that social conditions were improving and that with universal suffrage the working class could establish socialism by electing socialist representatives. The violence of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and its aftermath precipitated the final schism between the social-democratic parties and the communist parties.

In addition to abandoning violence and revolution as tools of social change, social democracy took a stand in opposition to totalitarianism. The Marxist view of democracy as a “bourgeois” facade for class rule was abandoned, and democracy was proclaimed essential for socialist ideals. Increasingly, social democracy adopted the goal of state regulation, but not state ownership, of business and industry as sufficient to further economic growth and equitable income.

"social democracy." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Library Edition.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011.
http://library.eb.com/eb/article-9068443