Reform and revolution

In a new five part series, DK Renton takes a personal look at some of rs21’s key political ideas. In part one he discusses reform and revolution.

When people join a revolutionary group for the first time, they are often surprised that there aren’t more of us. Most people who live in Britain are workers – not owning enough property to make other people work for them. Revolutionary politics starts from the needs of the workers, and we want a society where workers rule. So why don’t we have millions of people on our side? Part of the answer is that, all the time, people are offered what feel like easier options than revolution. Our supposedly social democratic (‘reformist’) party – Labour – promises working-class voters that if it is elected, it will pass reforms to make life more bearable. It offers trade union leaders the repeal of some of the Conservatives’ anti-union laws. Labour won’t reform the state, it won’t increase welfare benefits; in government, it is cracking down on trans people, anti-war and climate protesters. But it asks voters to accept that after five years in office, things overall might be slightly better than they were before. 

Even left-wing electoral alternatives to Labour (the Greens, Corbyn), still suffer from the same problem. They rely on politicians to deliver reforms on behalf of workers, when the rich are refusing to give up any wealth and the unelected state managers who run local and national government have decided that reforms are impossible. We need workers to grab power back from the state, but no-one in our political moment, not Syriza in Greece nor Die Linke in Germany, nor any of the politicians who put themselves forward for office here, are willing to fight the real battles needed to change the state and society.

Labour’s decision to offer voters less than it did before has opened up opportunities for right-wing parties. Vote for Reform or the Conservatives, we are told, and migrants will be expelled from Britain. Fewer people will mean more social housing, better-paid jobs. The promises are a con – just cutting immigration, without protecting jobs or benefits, won’t help anyone. And yet, faced with a Labour Party that’s promising little and delivering nothing, the right becomes that bit more credible.

What both wings of the electoral system offer voters is the idea that if they stay at home, someone else will represent them and deliver change on their behalf. In a world where people are trained by education and the media to feel powerless, in workplaces where the boss seems invincible, revolutionaries with our talk of organising the whole class to resist can seem like wild-eyed utopians. We are asking people to wager their own interests in order to achieve a common good. And yet, without struggle, and without people inspired by revolutionary ideas spreading and generalising the lessons of successful movements, workers will never win even our smaller demands, let alone the largest of them. 

When socialists first started organising on any serious scale, in the 1880s and 1890s, the argument our predecessors made was that the rich were hoarding resources. How, they said, could you have poverty alongside such plenty? 

In all the years since then, that argument has become even more true. The wealthiest man in the world is Elon Musk. He has a fortune of $400 billion dollars. Musk is so rich that he owns a fleet of private jet planes, a McLaren F1 car and a town in Texas (‘Starbase’). But, even at these levels of conspicuous consumption, Musk would have to live many lifetimes to spend all the money he has hoarded. On his death, each of his children will be richer than any medieval European king. They could build a new Versailles if they wanted or finish every meal with an ice cream wrapped in gold leaf – the money will never run out.

There’s a reason why people like Musk seem so unchallengeable. Capitalism, everywhere, is decaying as a system. In the 1900s, the system turned New York and London into paradises of consumption. In the 1960s, poorer regions of Europe as well as countries like South Korea, caught up with the richest nations. In the last 50 years, China has grown faster than anyone thought possible. But in the citadels of the most developed countries and increasingly through the system as a whole, capitalism is ageing and growing less profitable. It is no longer possible to increase the living standards of ordinary people without taking wealth from the rich, but this is exactly what reformists refuse to do.

The cowardice of once-reformist parties is self-defeating. Voters want better public healthcare, are begging the government to rebuild our crumbling public resources, to make trains work, repair the hospitals, fix our supplies of water and electricity. The rich are hoarding the resources we need to make our lives bearable.

Both wings of the parliamentary system rely on the same idea that capitalism is natural, there is no other way we could organise society. Yet people have lived on earth for two million years and class societies of all sorts have existed for less than half of one percent of that time. For most of the ten thousand years since the first kings and priests emerged, profit-making, and the exploitation of workers by bosses, were marginal activities. The first capitalist societies were born around 400 years ago, capitalism became the dominant global system not much more than a century ago. 

People will live on this planet for many more thousands of years, even as profitability stagnates, even as climate change forces millions of people to leave their homes, even while it turns food-producing regions into deserts, even as it leaves ever larger areas of the world too hot to sustain life. The only solution to global warming would be to expropriate the billionaires; and yet the capitalism we’ve built will neither demand they hand over their wealth, nor even tax them at a minimal rate. 

Capitalism is no more natural to human existence than all the gains which previous generations were able to wring out of the system during a period of expansion and point beyond exploitation – subsidised housing, welfare benefits, collectively-run healthcare.

The most famous statement of why we need a revolution is Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet, ‘Reform or Revolution’. That work began as articles for the left-wing press in 1898-9. Luxemburg was challenging the ideas of Eduard Bernstein, previously a confidant of Karl Marx but now moving to the right. He wanted German Social Democrats to tone down their previous belief in revolution in favour of a sole focus on reforms. Luxemburg had grown up in Poland, she had fought the repressive Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. She could not accept Bernstein’s insistence that the capitalist state would concede, without meaningful resistance, the reforms needed to transform workers’ lives.

Luxemburg was trying to keep reform open, as one weapon within the socialist armoury. She did not say that socialists had to in every single case choose revolution over reform, rather she presented both paths as interconnected. History puts both options before the workers’ movement. ‘Legislative reform and revolution are different factors in the development of class society. They condition and complement each other.’ When Luxemburg spoke of reformism, she meant not just the parliamentary activities of the elected Socialists, but also union struggles, which had the same character of demanding reforms from the system, and inside which workers had a greater space for self-activity than they had in the electoral sphere. A successful struggle for more generous laws, she argued – successful, for example, in the struggle for a shorter working week – would give those involved in that struggle a sense of their power. Popular victories would make both reforms and revolution seem more achievable.

Those who could only speak of reform, Luxemburg argued, were proposing to leave the system in place for ever.

That is why people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.

Bernstein was wrong to believe that the present economic order would carry on expanding forever. Capitalism, Luxemburg insisted, was not an economic system of generalised plenty: it meant wage slavery for the workers, competition and recession. 

Luxemburg was writing at a time when reformists still promised to reform capitalism. The long subsequent history of social democracy, the journey from Eduard Bernstein to Keir Starmer, is a story of retreat even from that limited vision.

When I think of revolutionary socialism, it seems to me that we are like an alternative family, gathered round a table, all of us comrades and yet far from all agreed. We are like-minded and we argue – we challenge one another because we are trying to work out the next steps to bring the system down. 

The highpoint of British workers’ struggle came 50 years ago, when the trade unions were strong enough to defeat hostile laws, and through mass strikes in 1972, and voters’ subsequent approval of them in the 1974 election, to bring down Edward Heath’s government. In this period of widespread hope, left-wing journalist Paul Foot described Labour’s parliamentary road as a ‘path to nowhere’. He wrote that,

The history of Labour in opposition is a history of anti-capitalist, socialist talk and anti-capitalist, socialist promises. But for 18 years in the last 60, Labour has been in government. And in all those 18 years, it has carried out policies which have strengthened capitalism and weakened socialism.

Labour governments since – Blair’s, Brown’s, Starmer’s – have been even worse.

One of Foot’s contemporaries on the far left, Duncan Hallas, described the barriers facing revolutionaries, in a situation where an old working class inside was being regenerated by new activists but they were not coming through fast enough.

A new generation of capable and energetic workers exists but they are no longer part of a cohesive movement and they no longer work in a milieu where basic Marxist ideas are widespread. Not only has the vanguard, in the real sense of a considerable layer of organised revolutionary workers and intellectuals, been destroyed. So too has the environment, the tradition, that gave it influence.

The situation he witnessed – old structures decaying as the new emerged – is the same one we face today.

As an alternative to reformism, Hallas called for the formation of a revolutionary party,

… a centre for mutual training and debate, for raising the level of the raw activist to that of the experienced, for the fusion of the experiences and outlook of manual and white-collar workers and intellectuals with ideas of scientific socialism. It must be a substitute for those institutions, special schools, universities, clubs, messes and so on, through which the ruling class imbues its cadres with a common outlook, tradition and loyalty.

They have Eton, Oxford, Sandhurst; we need to create our own rival institutions to defeat theirs.

Hallas spoke of socialism as a force to achieve change in society. He wrote, ‘Once large numbers of people actually act directly, collectively and continuously to change their conditions they not only change themselves; they undermine the whole basis of capitalism.’ His focus was on the system as a whole. But we can also see the very same processes through the eyes of the individual revolutionary – committing to change and setting the path by which they’ll live.

Interviewed in prison in 1972 where she was facing charges of conspiracy to murder manufactured by hostile state officials before being acquitted on all counts, the US Marxist Angela Davis spoke about this process of individual commitment to achieve collective change.

The revolutionary wants to change the nature of society in a way to promote a world where the needs and interests of the people are responded to. A revolutionary realises, however, that to create a world where human beings can live and love and be healthy and create, you must completely revolutionise the entire fabric of society.

Revolutionaries make a gamble on the future. We take part in moments of struggle so that we can deliver as much as we can. We seek, if you like, the impossible. We demand it to prove that a future based on human needs – Communism – is not in any way impractical. We hope to make the people around us into socialists; we try to do that by showing that even in the degraded society of the present, with all the burdens of work, of debt, of privatised care in the nuclear family – still, people will resist whenever they can. 

Each of us share our lives with workmates, with people who live on our estates. We can each make revolution seem that bit more possible to the people around us. Social democracy may have given up on the vision of improving people’s lives for the better. But, in choosing the revolutionary path, we each alike insist that a better world is possible.