Reply To: The case for a Minimalist and Maximum Movement
I think you’ll know that the topic you have raised has been subject to much debate and discussion ever since the 19th Century.
The SPGB has always supported workers defending themselves against the attacks of the employing class and the State hence our endorsement of the trade union movement and our support for them in industrial disputes. Trying to create a mass movement of people united against austerity attacks is one that must be supported. We have never advocate passive acquiescence to capitalism. When a member of the working class acquires revolutionary consciousness s/he is still compelled to take part in the non-revolutionary struggle. We fight in the here and now, where we are and where we can, as part of the working class and we don’t tell anyone to wait until the revolution arrives and nor do we say that class struggle is a diversion. As workers, socialists don’t sit around and wait for a revolution.
I’m sure you are aware that we do not oppose “all reforms” but rather we condemn a political policy which is solely directed at achieving them – reformism which views them as permanent palliatives to the many social problems we endure or see them as stepping stones towards socialism. Rejecting reformism is not the same as rejecting reforms that genuinely improve conditions for workers to the extent that this is possible. But there are better equipped organisations and groups to engage in the task of individual reforms than a socialist party. The Socialist Party neither promotes nor opposes reforms to capitalism. However, we believe that a socialist party shouldn’t work for reforms to capitalism.
The Socialist Party does not oppose reformism because it is against improvements in workers’ lives lest they dampen their revolutionary ardour; nor, because it thinks that decadent capitalism cannot deliver on reforms. But it is our condition as propertyless wage-slaves that undermines whatever attempts we make to control and better our lives through reforms.
Every organisation has to decide what it is working for, and whether that aim is important. We in the Socialist Party made a choice. The suggestion that there is no alternative to reformism and making a virtue of the necessity of them by pretending that reformism works is a danger for all see by turning socialism into a distant goal, not an immediate one and trying to convince them of socialism as a long-term aim is a mistake. A party without a clear commitment towards socialism will be mired in long-term reformism.
To repeat, the Socialist Party does not deny that certain reforms won by the working class have helped to improve our general living and working conditions. Indeed, we see little wrong with people campaigning for reforms that bring essential improvements and enhance the quality of their lives, and some reforms do indeed make a difference to the lives of millions and can be viewed as ‘successful’. There are examples of this in such fields as education, housing, employment of children, work conditions and social security. The Socialist Party acknowledges that the welfare state, the NHS and so on, made living standards for sections of the working class better than they had been under rampant capitalism and its early ideology of laissez-faire. Some reforms e.g. securing freedom of speech, extending the franchise, stopping a war, benefit the entire working class and socialist movement. However, we also recognise that such ‘successes’ have in reality done little more than to keep workers and their families fit to work and have rarely managed to remove the problem completely.
Reformism is a most excellent strategy if you want only minor cosmetic changes to society, and are easily satisfied with what you get. Over decades, millions have invested their hopes in so-called “practical” and “possibilist” organisations and policies, hoping against hope that they would be able to neuter the market economy when, in reality, the market economy has successfully neutered them. They turned out to be the real “impossibilists”.
Demanding the unattainable humane gentle capitalism is one of the greatest tragedies and it is made all the greater because it was all so predictable. Yet still many hold the idea that capitalism can be reformed into something kindly and user-friendly.