Contemporary capitalism is in many ways shaped by social democracy. Just think of the notions of socially just wages, a regulated market, the right of workers to organize, wealth distribution, social welfare, the ethos of solidarity or the understanding of companies as organizations with social responsibilities. These modifications of capitalism can be traced back to the historical struggles of social democratic parties. Today, social democracy is in its deepest crisis since World War II.The video analyzes two interrelated factors that help understand the decline of social democracy. A first factor that explains the current crisis of social democracy is the transformation of capitalism over the past decades. At the root of that transformation is a deep crisis of capitalism; more concretely, the demise of the Fordist-Keynesian growth model of the postwar decades. The transition to neoliberalism not only weakened the labor movement and trade unions. It also demolished the economic foundations of social democracy and deprived policies of redistribution their material basis. Under neoliberal globalization, it has become increasingly difficult to pursue a demand-oriented economic policy and to expand the welfare state.A second factor that explains the current crisis of social democracy are changes of the social structure. The shrinking of the industrial working class, which has always been the core constituency of social democratic parties, has contributed to their decline. This process has gone hand in hand with the weakening of trade unions. With the transformation of an industrial society into a postindustrial society, social democracy has lost its traditional clientele. To prevent a permanent drop in voter favorability, social democratic parties have increasingly shifted their programmatic orientation toward the middle class. This strategy has made many workers politically homeless. Large sectors of the working class have turned away from social democracy and towards right-wing populist parties.