[PEN-L:28287] DoMT on Reformism

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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, 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