#reformism — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #reformism, aggregated by home.social.
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One way that people try to dismiss revolutionary action is by trying to position it as preventing reform. But I don't think that's true at all. I think that in a system like the one we live in, that fundamentally exists to serve the few at the expense of the many, reform only happens when there is a rise in revolutionary sentiment, as an attempt to quell revolution. While reforms are never adequate to fix deep-seated societal issues, they obviously can have some utility for allieviating suffering. So I don't see reforms as inherently bad.
However, I do see reformism as counterproductive, even to bringing about reforms. Why? Because I think it fundamentally misidentifies what causes reformists to be elected and what causes reforms to happen. I think reforms can only happen in an environment of rising revolutionary sentiment. Because reforms are a desperate effort by a failing society to stave off revolution, not something granted when people play by the rules of that society. When people play by the rules, society knows it doesn't have to do anything to change itself. When people play by the rules, society knows that words, that lies are enough, that no action is needed. Society doesn't want reform. So reform only happens when it needs to stave off something it doesn't want even more: revolution.
What I'm trying to say is that even if someone is only aspiring for reforms, it's counterproductive to malign and obstruct revolutionaries, when it is only because of revolutionaries that society implements reforms in the first place. -
Revolutionary Communists of America - Revolutionary Communists of America [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·The Dictatorship of Capital: Bond Markets Twist the Screws on Britain’s Political Leaders
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Mexico cuts workweek, bans after-hours contact, and guarantees no worker will take a pay cut in the most sweeping labor reform in a generation
> Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ignore their boss's
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I often see the sentiment that revolutionary action is unrealistic or undesirable because there are pressing actions that need to be resolved in the now, and so the only effective response is reformism. But the necessity of smaller actions to address current issues is not an argument against the necessity of larger actions to improve the future.
If a person is bleeding out after a major injury, they need bandages now to staunch the flow of blood, but they may also need surgery later to mend broken bones, repair organs, or remove shrapnel. Just adding more bandages won't fix any of those things.
The necessity of triaging current issues as best we can with the tools we have available now in no way implies that the answer to politics is reformism. -
"‘Liberal’ and ‘capitalist’ paired as a hyphenated compound word seems like an oxymoron, leaving one to wonder, what do civil liberties and democracy have to do with an economic system that often infringes on the aforementioned liberal defining characteristics? Well, A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms by Giampaolo Conte analyzes the historical scope of capitalist reforms, particularly through the British economy, under the guise of liberalism from the nineteenth century and beyond. In just four chapters, while grazing the philosophy of Marxism through figures like Antonio Gramsci, Conte offers a clarifying historical perspective on the evolution of capitalist reforms. Conte’s engagement in this historical project reignites a conversation on the ability of capitalism, a system that thrives on exploitation and violence, to textually morph into an ostensibly paradoxical philosophy, that is, liberalism, to gain submission (domestically and internationally), expand dominance and accumulate capital. A History of Capitalist Transformation displays how domestic social classes and semi-peripheral states (developing nations) have both fallen prey to the expansion of internal and external capitalist reforms. According to Conte, the action of falling prey is caused by the presentation of liberal-capitalist reforms as they are presented through the cultural, moral and civic values of liberalism and not the violent and individualist values of capitalism (38)."
#Capitalism #Liberalism #EconomicHistory #Reformism #PoliticalEconomy
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Reformism is dumb because it's ineffective. The bourgeois revolutions prove that the only way to radically change the world is the revolutionary approach.
#Capitalism #WageSlavery #Domination #Reformism #ClimateChange: "In other words, there are at least two reasons to think the long-term horizons of the Left should go beyond reforming capitalism with better regulations or a bigger welfare state to transcending capitalist property relations entirely. One is philosophical: we don’t think it’s fair or reasonable that some people have to rent themselves out to capitalists while other people get to live off the labor of others.
But the other reason is practical. We’ve noticed that where important reforms have been achieved in the past, they’re eroded or even reversed by the efforts of the politically powerful capitalist class. As the Marxist theoretician Rosa Luxemburg once put it, reforms are important, but a workers’ movement whose long-term horizons are limited to reform ends up being like Sisyphus in Greek mythology — perpetually rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down.
That’s bad enough when it comes to reforms that remove entirely avoidable forms of human misery. But it’s potentially catastrophic when it comes to the environmental issues that seem to be among the only problems with capitalism Hossenfelder has noticed. If we don’t take power out of the hands of the capitalists who are letting their unquenchable thirst for profit destroy the planet, our very survival as a species may be at risk."
https://jacobin.com/2023/11/capitalism-market-economy-sabine-hossenfelder-youtube/
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"Those #posts going around about how we can't pop off in the us because the "cops will shoot #everyone" is such #coward shit. Nearly every #insurrectionary moment/movement towards rupture that I've experienced/witnessed has imploded from intra milieu infighting, respectability #politics, #reformism and #peace #policing, not #police #violence.
Nobody ever said that #liberation would be easy but the #cops aren't some omnipotent and omnipresent force that can smash down every #protest/action with an iron fist.
Lack of #respect for a #diversity of #tactics and a deeply ingrained #mythology about the "effectiveness of peaceful #protest" is FAR more paralytic to a burgeoning #insurrectionary tendency than violence can ever be."
https://www.tumblr.com/thelearnedwobbly/715191588122394625?source=share
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CW: Chokepoint Capitalism, reformism, the administrative state, and democratic power
Begun reading #Chokepoint #Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and @pluralistic and it's interesting to see a very identifiable political thread in its blurb people- Adam Conover, Lawrence Lessig, Zephyr Teachout, Jimmy Wales.
These people, who I would, personally, characterize as left-liberals much of the time, provide an interesting anchor point in the political and economic movement for #socialjustice. Some of them have gained an amount of reach and are viewed as experts or at the very least accessible communicators.
In the introduction we see a point of tension in the dialectic between "the minimum demand" (mild, almost performative reform) and "the maximum demand" (#revolution from the root to a different system). #Trotsky is known for the transitional program, but *Reform and Revolution* by #Luxemburg, a bunch of #Kautsky. It's a very long current in the camp of people that want to replace the relations of society and production.
Fascists obviously have used critiques of capitalism in order to gain a political audience, but Germany during the Third Reich reminds one a lot of the kind of incestuous relationship of dominant industry and the political elite.
The question is basically, can what is in many ways a deep overhaul of the #administrative state, something everyone thinks of when they think of Sen. Elizabeth #Warren, really possible? There has to be enough "democracy in the system" to get to the end point, and the US in particular has both issues of #federalism and a federal judiciary that despises the administrative state. Also changes such as relate to monopoly, monopsony, and competition, may in some cases lack what I think is the core way that #reformism can be built upon- stickiness.
I mean essentially that universal benefit programs, well funded, are the most difficult to reverse from the free-market right. They have a very large supportive population that melds the poor, working class, and aspects of the petty bourgeoisie and professionals together in common interests.
Targeting, as is done in neoliberalism, creates inter-class conflict among those not in the elite, and can be stoked additionally by #race, #citizenship, and other factors. Neoliberalism by design when it does #welfare makes programs extremely brittle and easy to defund.
So even though the Tories have had two decade and a half long reigns in power since 1979, and Tony Blair was thoroughly a center-right New Labour PM, the #NHS has stubbornly stuck around even in its crisis state. It has resiliency.
But having enough #democracy in the system is difficult. We can look at Castillo in #Peru and #Boric in Chile, who both rode into power promising a fundamentally new, inclusive, and anti-neoliberal constitution. Actually getting through entrenched power structures, a right-wing #media apparatus, and the eternal riddle of many aspects of a #constitution being popular but at a referendum it adds up to less.
The phrase "#Chile will be the tomb of #neoliberalism imagines an end to neoliberalism- #AMLO talks about this a lot whatever you might think of his time in power. But how do you get over the hump? How do you dispatch it, and make sure it doesn't return? How do you hold sustained power so the capitalists can't just reverse all that can be done? How can genuine democracy and social justice come to fruition?
I don't have a lot of answers, but I appreciate how much was sparked just in the introduction of Chokepoint Capitalism
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France: Our Future Belongs to Us
The following text, first published at Paris-Luttes is taken from an as yet unpublished pamphlet produced in the wake of the French elections. Its authors intend to release further chapters in due course.“The sheep go to the slaughterhouse. They say nothing to each other, and they hope for nothing. But at leas
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2022/05/08/france-our-future-belongs-to-us/
#Anarchism #France #generalelection #macronism #reformism #socialdemocacy
