Some controversy has existed in the
political left over social corporatism, where it has been criticized for abandoning the concept of
class struggle in favour of
class collaboration and compromise, legitimizing
privately owned enterprise and for lending credence to a form of regulated
capitalism. Others on the left counter these criticisms by claiming that social corporatism has been
progressive in providing institutional legitimacy to the labour movement that recognizes the existence of ongoing class conflict between the
bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, but they seek to provide peaceful resolutions to disputes arising from the conflict based on moderation rather than
revolution. Proponents of social corporatism consider it a class compromise within the context of existing
class conflict. In the 1930s, social democracy was labeled
social fascism by the
Communist International which maintained that social democracy was a variant of
fascism because in addition to their shared corporatist economic model they stood in the way of transitioning to
communism and
socialism. The development of social corporatism began in Norway and Sweden in the 1930s and was consolidated in the 1960s and 1970s. The system was based upon the dual compromise of capital and the labour as one component and the market and the state as the other component. Social corporatism developed in Austria under the post-World War II coalition government of the
Social Democratic Party of Austria and the
Austrian People's Party. Social corporatism in Austria protects private property in exchange for allowing the labour movement to have political recognition and influence in the economy—to avoid the sharp class conflict that plagued Austria in the 1930s. Social corporatism later expanded to many other
Western European and
Latin American countries with the spread of the
welfare state, social democracy, and
industrial unionism, in addition to local movements such as
Peronism.
J. Barkley Rosser Jr. and Marina V. Rosser wrote on the prevalence of social corporatism in Europe by the late 20th century: Liberal corporatism is largely self-organized between labor and management, with only a supporting role for government. Leading examples of such systems are found in small, ethnically homogeneous countries with strong traditions of social democratic or labor party rule, such as Sweden's Nordic neighbors. Using a scale of 0.0 to 2.0 and subjectively assigning values based on six previous studies, Frederic Pryor in 1988 found Norway and Sweden the most corporatist at 2.0 each, followed by Austria at 1.8, the Netherlands at 1.5, Finland, Denmark, and Belgium at 1.3 each, and Switzerland and West Germany at 1.0 each. == See also ==