DoMT on Reformism

[Chris Burford]

 
Reformism

Entry in Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2^nd Edition Ed Tom Bottomore 1991

[with assistance from Ralph Miliband. Formatted for web reading  CB]


Reformism is best understood as one major position in a long-standing debate on the nature of the transition to socialism and on the political strategy most appropriate to its attainment.

Since the 1890s at least, debate has raged within the socialist sections of the labour movements of advanced capitalism on a related set of questions to which the writings of Marx and Engels gave only the most ambiguous of answers:

whether the transition to socialism could be achieved without violence;
 
whether that transition would be a gradual and smooth process of incremental social change or one best characterized by struggle and crisis culminating in a decisive moment of social transformation;

and whether its attainment was possible through the exploitation by the working class of existing political institutions (most notably the parliaments and elected executives of the bourgeois democratic state) or only by the supplementation or even replacement of those state structures by new avenues of socialist struggle and new forms of popular administration.

Different packages of answers to those questions have been provided by different socialist parties and theorists at various times since 1890, but for forty years after 1917 the choice of answers tended to be a relatively straightforward one:

between a revolutionary (more properly, insurrectlonary) path to socialism that derived its inspiration from Lenin; and a reformism that could be traced back to the writings of Kautsky and to the political practice of pre-1914 German Social Democracy.

It is important to distinguish reformism from the less ambitious politics of social reform. As Miliband (1977, p. 155) has observed,

there has always existed a trend in working class movements �.. towards social reform; and this is a trend which, in so far as it has no thought of achieving the wholesale transformation of capitalist society into an entirely different social order, must sharply distinguished from the 'reformist' strategy, which has insisted that this was precisely its purpose.
 
It is important to recognize that insurrectionary socialists and reformists have not disagreed on the need for socialism.

Their disagreement has focused instead on the manner of its attainment,

and on what goes with that, the �scale and extent of the immediate economic and social transformation' (ibid. p. 178) that the transition to it necessarily entails.
 
For at least two generations after 1917, the revolutionary current in Western Marxism tended to see that transition as necessarily violent in character and insurrectionary form, involving struggle outside (as well as occasionally within) existing political institutions, and culminating in the replacement of the bourgeois state by the DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT.

The advocates of reformism, on the other hand, believed in the possibility of achieving socialism by constitutional means. They looked first to win the battle for majority control of the democratic state, then to use their position as the democratically elected government to superintend a peaceful and legitimate transition to socialism. It is this belief 'in the possibility of attaining socialism by gradual and peaceful reform within the framework of a neutral parliamentary State' (Anderson 1980, p176-7) that constitutes the defining belief of the reformist route to socialism.

The reformist current in the socialist movements in advanced capitalist societies has been and remains a powerful one. Social democratic parties (see SOCIAL DEMOCRACY) have long made it the defining element of their strategy; and the political practice (and latterly the theorizing) of many West European communist parties has gravitated towards it in the wake of those parties' growing disenchantment with the Soviet Union and the insurrectionary route to power.

Both sets of parties have been pulled to "reformism by the obvious problems of that insurrectionary alternative - not least its unpopularity, its violence and its vanguardism - and by 'the extremely strong attraction which legality, 'constitutionalism, electoralism, and representative institutions of the parliamentary type have had for the overwhelming majority of people in the working-class movements of capitalist societies' (Miliband 1977, p. 172).

But though popular, reformism too has its problems - especially the seemingly inexorable propensity of reformist parties to slide from a commitment to socialism towards the less arduous pursuit of social reforms and electoral advantage within capitalism, and the associated difficulties which even resolute reformists experience of dismantling capitalism incrementally and without precipitating reactionary violence.

Far from proving an effective route to socialism, reformist parties have more normally been the crucial political mechanism through which the working class has been incorporated into a subordinate position within a strengthened bourgeois order (as in Britain, Norway, Sweden, West Germany and Austria);

alternatively, on those rare occasions when they have been more resolute, they have been the harbingers, not of socialism, but of the violent suppression of workers by repressive capitalist states (as in Germany in 1933, and Chile forty years later). (On this, see Anderson 1980, p.196.)

The contemporary dilemma of socialists in Western Europe can be said to turn still on the paradox of reformism: on the apparent unpopularity of any strategy that is not reformist, and impossibility of effectively implementing any strategy that is.

This paradox lies behind the propensity of both Left Eurocommunists and left-wing social democrats to seek a 'third way' to socialism that is neither reformist nor insurrectionary.

For them, the simple search for a parliamentary majority, or for a brief period of a power before the dismantling of the bourgeois state, has to be replaced by a strategy which seeks both a parliamentary victory and 'the unfurling of forms of direct democracy and the mushrooming of self-management bodies' (Poulantzas 1978, p. 256). For them, reformism is not 'a vice inherent in any strategy other than that of dual power', but rather 'an ever latent danger', to be avoided by struggle within and outside the State in a 'long process of transformation' (ibid. pp. 258, 263).

More orthodox revolutionaries remain unconvinced, seeing in a new rhetoric the old reformist propensity to underestimate the problems of class violence and the centrality of class struggle in the transition to socialism (see Mandel 1978, pp. 167- 87). The question of which of these positions, if any, is correct must remain the central issue to be resolved by socialists in Western Europe in the last years of the century.

Reading
Anderson, P. 1980: Arguments within English Marxism.
Claudin, F. 1979: Eurocommunism and Socialism.
Hodgson, G. 1977: Socialism and Parliamentary Democracy.
Mandel, E. 1978. From Stalinism to Eurocommunism.
Miliband, R. 1977: Marxism and Politics.
Poulantzas, N. 1978: State. Power, Socialism.
Salvadori, M. 1979: Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution.
Wright, E. 0. 1978: Class. Crisis and the State.

DAVID COATES