This is something that I wrote in April 2012, when for a few weeks some socialist groups in the UK were anticipating sweeping victories by Galloway's Respect and also the French Parti de Gauche:
The Menace of Reformism
The victory of George’
Galloway’s Respect Party was a bolt from the blue for the elites of
Britain. Establishment pundits were quick to fall back on the
stereotypical talking points: extremist, cat impersonating, cigar
chomping ideologue. They were quicker still to skip over any meaningful
analysis of this event, declaring that his victory had no wider
ramifications. As with the summer riots and the financial
crisis, critical analysis is the kryptonite of the ruling classes; it
is unthinkable that there is some kind of systemic flaw in capitalism,
merely glitches to be managed. In France, the luminaries of the large
parties; the Parti Socialiste and the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire
must be similarly confused by the thumping progress of Melenchon’s
underdog, the Parti de Gauche, which is rattling the cage, evoking the
French revolution and denouncing the EU as a technocratic institution
corrupted by neoliberalism beyond redemption. The steady progress of the
Green Party can be seen as a further aspect of this trend.
As austerity grinds ever onward and the
economy flat lines, glossy new political parties emerge that pledge to
change everything via reform of the present system. In a world of
collapsing regimes, financial crisis and historic levels of inequality,
people can be forgiven for seeking to reform the system. However, there
is a significant yet oft ignored risk that reformist political parties
can do more harm than good. Historical examples of this are ample; the
German supposed socialist Ebert working in concert with the paramilitary
Freikorps to crush the workers uprisings in 1919 or the Labour
government of 70’s that promised to “squeeze the rich until the pips
squeak” yet in reality initiated crippling real wage cuts. For a
contemporary example of betrayal by a reformist party, look no further
than the Liberal Democrats, who made shiny-eyed promises to remove
tuition fees in the 2010 general election, only to jump into bed with
the Conservatives, forming a government with no mandate and completely
abandoning their manifesto, most notably increasing tuition fees rather
than abolishing them.
As well as running the real risk of major U
turns, entrusting meaningful change to political parties working through
parliamentary process alone shows a grave misunderstanding of the
nature of political power and agency. In capitalist democracies, power
is exercised by the judiciary, the police, the local authorities,
religious bodies, trade unions and the great multitude of organisations
that make up civil society. As well as this there is the power of the
capitalists; media giants such as News Corporation that command
newspapers, television channels and major news websites, fossil fuel
giants that symbiotically support state infrastructure and global
finance houses that crash economies from time to time. Deeper and
broader movements that harness wider social processes are needed to
challenge these institutions; the power of Parliament alone will not
suffice. For Europeans this is especially relevant in the light of the
growing involvement of supra-national pan-European institutions in
propping up the Euro at the expense of national sovereignty, which is
considered as an anachronistic hindrance at best by the likes of the ECB
and the IMF. When the then Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou
proposed a referendum on the need for EU bailouts in Greece, he was
savaged from all sides, and the democratic move was derided as
“irresponsible” as it threatened the markets. Papandreou was rapidly
replaced, and this trend has been mirrored across the EU as the banks
and the state merge even further.
The shallowness of reformism can be further
illustrated by the inane process that drives it: what more do people
expect from rallying people for a ceremony of mass box ticking? The
simple act of choosing one of many parties, and possibly canvassing and
rallies for the chosen disciples, then the victorious party occupies its
offices, slotting into pre-defined jobs, institutions and processes. A
very limited form of politics indeed. During times of real upheaval and
revolutionary change nothing goes unchallenged. George Orwell writes of
his experience during the Spanish civil war that “Every shop
and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even
the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and
black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you
as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily
disappeared. Nobody said ‘Senior’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone
called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of
‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience
was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a
lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been
commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other
transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were
everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the
few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud.”
Similar experiences have been described in Tahrir square: trusting
strangers implicitly, the mix of people from all walks of life coming
together, Islamic traditions centuries old broken in days as single
women sleep next to single men sheltered beneath the tanks, which are
bedecked in graffiti. During revolutionary upheavals, as society changes
political systems, political processes change society as people work
live and fight together for shared convictions, they learn the meaning
of solidarity which is can only be a shadow invoked by the politicians
within the realm of conventional, reformist politics.
This does not signify a complete detachment
from reformist political processes; any political change that leads to
better lives for the vast majority should be supported. However, on its
own, reformist politics is not only a poor method for political change,
it can be dangerous and can be used as a tool to divert the energy of
political struggle into channels that do not challenge the hegemony of
the elites. Nobody voted in the counter-culture of the 1960’s yet it
thoroughly transformed our political and cultural realities beyond
recognition. The Arab Spring re-shaped the geo-political landscape more
in a year than decades of Western interventions. The suffragettes were
denounced as hysterical, insane misfits in their time, yet they
ultimately achieved franchise for 50% of the population. Political power
does not just lie in the halls of power; it lies in the street, in the
occupied parks and the stuffy meeting rooms. Every human being holds it
in their hands, and the professional suits that want to sign us up to
their progressive campaigns then have us go home and do no more would do
well to remember this.
