Reform Movements and reformism
I have the Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd Edition Ed Tom Bottomore 1991 in front of me and this book is dated to say the least. It is true that in the historical era identified with the name of Mr. Lenin reformism as an broad ideological category became defined on the basis of insurrection. That is the fight for revolutionaries to seize the authority of the state and reorganize it to implement public property relations in the industrial infrastructure without regard to the specific state of development of the productive forces. This is how reformism appeared and manifested itself based on the previous configuration of the economy or productive forces and the corresponding mode of accumulation.
What is the basis of the reform movement as a specific spontaneous social current in society? This demands sublating - not disregarding, the doctrine associated with the name of Lenin.
Reform movements arise on the basis of the economy not from the thinking in the heads of individuals. Specifically, reform movements or movements to reform the system - economic, social and political assertions, arise based on the quantitative and qualitative configuration that defines a phase of development of the productive forces and relations of production. Reform movements in the past allowed the capitalist to system to function more efficiently and strengthened the productive relations.
The reform movement against slavery in America demanded a revolution in social relations. The reform movement called the Civil Rights Movement was generated on the basis of the mechanization of agriculture. The reform movement that generated the Taft Hartley Act was based in the expansion of industrial capital. The reform Movement that generated Bretton Wood was based in the war destruction of Europe and Japan. The reform Movement against colonialism was based in the expansion of capital and the need to dismantle the closed (industrial) colonial system and allow for the expansion of finance capital.
The reform movement and reformism of the era of Mr. Lenin occurred within a definable period of history that can be summed up as the completion of the first world phase of industrial development on the one hand and the emergence of financial and industrial capital on the other.
Reform movements are objective phenomenon expressing material relations in society. Reformism - the various ideological expressions of this objective process, is a horse of a different color but nevertheless, a horse. A reform movement arises within the working class movement because the struggle of the basic classes that constitutes the internal unity of productive relations is by definition an unending struggle over the division of the social product and political liberty. An exploited class cannot overthrow an exploiting class since they together make up the system.
Since neither basic class cannot overthrow the system, the basic struggle of the masses has in the main, been led by the organized sector of the working class and its fundamental goal cannot be but to re form or restructure the system in favor of the people. These efforts to re form or restructuring is society's recognition of quantitative changes in the economic process that demand changes in the social process. Thus all reforms are political and redefine the relations between and within classes.
This concept is somewhat difficult because of the boundary of capital we have just left. All reform movements arise to reconfigure social relations to conform to a given boundary in the development of the productive forces. This is a general and more than less accurate definition of reform movement.
The serf and feudal authority could not and did not overthrow the system of feudalism because it is not possible for the basic classes of a social system - whose unity and strife is the mode of expression of the motion of the system, to overthrow that of which it is the basic component. Another element has to emerge from within this basic unity and strife holding the system together. In the case of feudalism this "other element" was new production relations in the form of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
The reform movement is thus an objective movement generated on the basis of the productive forces.
The revolutionaries led by Mr. Lenin, Stalin and yes, Mr. Trotsky - seized political and military authority in Russia based on the collapse of civil authority caused by Russia's defeat in the imperialist war. Their slogan was "land, bread and peace." This summarized the various reform movements in their society. The doctrine of Lenin called this process the art of revolution or the revolutionary struggle for reform.
We have arrived at a point in history where capital cannot be reformed. This means class and productive relations cannot be altered as the basis for the quantitative expansion of the system and the strengthening of the productive relations. There is no more qualitative expansion for the system. What makes reform no longer possible is the injection into the productive process of a new qualitative feature, which halts the expansion of the system o the basis of electro-mechanical means of production. Electro-computerized production qualitatively reconfigures the basic classes in society - proletariat and capitalist alike. A new qualitative feature emerges from within the working class in the form of a mass of proletarians unable to sell their labor power and existing outside the employer-employee relations that defined capital as a social system.
This mass of proletarians unable to sell their labor power and existing outside the employer-employee relations that defined capital as a social system, is called the "new class" because it cannot develop on the basis of the law of value or rather the production of surplus value. It is locked out of the basis components of the system. The movement from this sector of society to reform the system - share in the distribution of the social product and political liberty is an objective revolutionary demand for a new law system of production and political freedom.
This process is called the evolutionary leap and requires that I restudy intensely the doctrine of the leap as a component of dialectics. This also means that I must continue studying the revolutionary essence of Marx conception of antagonism under our new conditions. The leap is underway. We are in transition to a new mode of production and not a quantitative expansion of the same thing - capital. The "space" for systemic expansion is exhausted.
But the working class does not know the "space" for systemic expansion is exhausted. We are the teachers.
There is of course a growing movement for reform of the system from every sector of society including the capitalist who are be ruined in the marketplace. The working class movement consolidates its national political voice on the basis of the split in the ruling class and its need to win a section of the class to its striving as the basis to defeat its opponents.
Thus there is reform and "reform." Reform without quotes is the objective impulse on that part of society whose existence and growth demands distribution of the social product and altering political reality in its favor/flavor. "Reform" with quotes emerges from that section of society that still makes up the working components of the system. A section of capitalist and workers are demanding "reform."
This exploration of the reform movement and reformism is an expression of the fact that something new is taking place and we are attempting to grasp that which constitutes new features in the working class movement. That is our conceptions of doctrine are undergoing the leap. To remain at the last stage of the social movement and only define the reform movement on the basis of the doctrine of Lenin will catch the revolutionaries "flatfooted" and regulate us to history.
The economy has passed a threshold or crossed a nodal point, and all social activity is forced to conform to a new reality. Doctrine changes. All reforms can be fought for and utilized by the revolutionaries but revolutionaries are not reformist because we are not trying to create better old property relations. The demand for a society of associated producers, where the social product is not distributed based o the labor contribution of the individual echoes the revolution underway in the productive forces. There is no more reform left in capital - no more "space" for its further expansion, as a social system.
The employed workers will most certainly enter an intense round of struggle for concessions from their employers. There are no concessions the employers can extend that will alter class relations and strengthen the production relations. The employed workers in Argentina are on the ropes . . . man. The unionized autoworkers in Argentina are being pushed into the lower sector of the working class. Corporate Executives are being pushed into the working class.
Engels created a new doctrine in the working class movement using the ballot box because the composition of capital changed. Mr. Lenin created a new doctrine in the working class movement because there were further changes in the composition of capital. Our exploration of the reform movement under conditions of changes in the composition of capital is our striving in search of a new doctrine that corresponds to this phase in the decay of capital.
The revolutionary struggle for reform is being recast. Liquidate the last ideological period.
Melvin P.
>Reformism
>Entry in Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd 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, insurrectionary) 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
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- DoMT on Reformism Chris Burford
- Waistline2
