Global Financial Crisis 2008 – Article No 21
by Humphrey McQueen
Reformism
Accusations of “reformism” ricochet around meetings of Left grouplets. If only the proletariat would see through reformists and embrace our revolutionary program …
As the crisis in the expanded reproduction of capital unfolds, so does the need for strategies and tactics to protect working people. To devise these lines of action revolutionaries need to ponder what these alternatives of revolution and reformism mean in daily life.
An earlier piece discussed why state violence makes revolution a graveyard for socialists more than for capitalism. Does the impossibility of revolution succeeding here for any foreseeable future reduce the Left to reformism?
To answer, we must banish the Philosophically Idealist notion that “reformism” is a mistaken idea. Marx satirised the Young Hegelians for supposing that people drowned because their minds were full of the idea of gravity. If only they could free themselves from that idea, their lungs would not fill with water.
Mao was spot-on for saying that correct ideas do not drop out of the sky and not are innate in our minds. They derive, he went on, from social practice and from it alone. The catch is that so do incorrect ideas. That is why reformism is pervasive. Which social practice gives reformism its staying and pulling powers? Reformism is the hourly practice of the proletariat in our struggle for survival.
Who does more to maintain the rule of capital than wage-slaves selling our labour power. Without that exchange, no surplus value could be produced and capital could not exist. Telling workers to stop being “reformists” is like telling them to stop eating. By contrast, revolutionary practices form almost no part of the daily doings of any Australian worker.
Reformism also deserves to be distinguished from opportunism and careerism, which can be seen as more or less conscious choices.
Reformism is often associated with “trade union politics”, or what Lenin called “economism”. This limitation is not always consciously anti-revolutionary. One strand in the IWW rejected all forms of politics, not just parliamentary cretinism, in favour of direct action at the point of production. Their critics wanted to know how that focus could vanquish the state.
Two other forms of “economism” have competed for leadership the Australian labour movement. On one hand, a strategic economism found expression in the Communist Parties. They accepted that there could be no end to exploitation within capitalism. Their often militant campaigns taught, in word and deed, that there could be no such thing as a fair day’s pay and that the state was the instrument of class rule.
In tactical economism, on the other hand, unionists and politicians either ignore or deny those insights; instead, they plead for a fair-go through a state which they picture as a neutral umpire.
In practice, strategic economists are often compelled to do much the same but from a contrary frame of reference. One task for revolutionaries is make that frame more than rhetorical.
No demand is intrinsically reformist. For instance, the right to form a union becomes revolutionary if the bosses refuse and what wage-slaves cannot capitulate.
Reformism appeals because it is grounded in a solution to the here and the now. Hence, militants cannot argue someone out of reformism as they might change a friend’s mind about a dropped catch by showing the ball from a different camera angle. As with religion, the call to abolish reformism is the call to abolish the conditions that make it necessary.
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