Can capitalism be reformed?

New to Marxism: Session 3 of 6

Reformism, the state and the road to power

Workers have won higher wages, public services, democratic rights and protection from discrimination through struggle. Every one of these gains matters. But can reforms accumulate until capitalism has gradually become socialism—or will the struggle eventually have to confront the ownership and state power of the capitalist class?

Marxists fight for reforms while rejecting reformism: the strategy of transforming society through parliament, legislation and negotiation without a revolution. The difference is not between caring about immediate needs and caring about a distant socialist future. It is about how today’s struggles can prepare the working class to take power.

What you will learn

• The difference between fighting for reforms and adopting a reformist strategy.
• Why the capitalist state is not a neutral instrument that can simply be taken over.
• How transitional demands and united action can connect immediate struggles to the fight for workers’ power.

Reforms matter

The right to vote, legal trade unions, public healthcare and many other gains were not gifts from enlightened rulers. They were conceded under pressure from mass movements, strikes and the threat of wider social upheaval.

Marxists therefore fight for wage rises, decent housing, public services, democratic rights, freedom from oppression and urgent action against climate breakdown. A victory can make an immediate difference and teach workers that collective action works. It can create organisation, confidence and a stronger position from which to fight again.

But gains made under capitalism are insecure. During periods of economic expansion, employers may grant concessions if doing so preserves order and profitability. During a crisis, they demand wage restraint, austerity, longer hours and attacks on rights. Public services can be cut or privatised; union organisation can be weakened; democratic rights can be narrowed.

The conclusion is not that reforms are pointless. It is that every reform depends on the balance of class forces and remains vulnerable while capitalist ownership continues.

What is reformism?

Reformism is a political strategy, not simply a desire for reform. It treats the capitalist economy and state as a framework within which the workers’ movement can steadily gain influence, win elections and legislate its way towards socialism.

Its most familiar form seeks a parliamentary majority and a left government. Other versions place their hopes in trade-union negotiation, local government, cooperatives or pressure on existing parties. What they share is the attempt to change society without overthrowing capitalist class power.

In Britain, reformism has historically been expressed through the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy. Labour’s union links and working-class voters distinguish it from openly capitalist parties. But its leaders, parliamentary representatives and programme are committed to governing through the existing state and managing the capitalist economy. Union officials, meanwhile, are pulled towards negotiating compromises and preserving the institutions they administer rather than developing struggles that threaten the system.

This does not mean every Labour supporter or trade-union official holds identical views. Revolutionaries fight alongside reformist workers and seek to win them through common experience. But the strategy pursued by their leaders repeatedly turns working-class organisations into supports for capitalist stability.

Where capitalist power lies

Parliament is one part of the state, but it is not where most state power resides. Governments come and go while judges, police chiefs, military commanders, intelligence officials and senior civil servants remain. These institutions are organised hierarchically and insulated from direct popular control. Their everyday functions include enforcing contracts, protecting property and maintaining the conditions for capitalist production.

The state can regulate businesses, tax profits or act against an individual capitalist. It may nationalise a failing industry or provide welfare in order to stabilise society. This limited independence does not make it neutral. The state protects the capitalist system as a whole, including when that requires restraining the short-term interests of particular companies.

Behind and alongside the state stands the concentrated power of banks, corporations, landlords and media owners. A government seriously threatening their property could face capital flight, an investment strike, factory closures, price rises, financial panic and a campaign to remove it. The permanent state apparatus gives the ruling class further means to obstruct, destabilise and ultimately repress a challenge.

A left government would therefore face a choice. It could mobilise workers to seize economic power, dismantle the old state machinery and build new institutions of workers’ democracy. Or it could retreat in order to restore business confidence and maintain the authority of the existing state. Reformism does not prepare its supporters for the first course and therefore leads towards the second.

Parliamentary elections can still be used to measure support, expose ruling-class politics and popularise socialist demands. Elected representatives can assist struggles if they are accountable to the workers’ movement. But parliament cannot substitute for the independent organisation of the working class or transform the capitalist state into an instrument of emancipation.

The transitional method

If neither gradual reform nor passive waiting offers a way forward, how should revolutionaries act today? We begin with real needs and existing struggles. But we do not limit our demands to what employers, markets and governments say the system can afford.

Consider an energy-price crisis. An immediate campaign might demand lower bills and the cancellation of household debt. Revolutionaries would support these measures while demanding that the energy companies open their accounts, that workers and consumers inspect their operations, and that the major companies be taken into public ownership without compensating their wealthy shareholders. Production and prices should then be placed under workers’ and consumers’ control and integrated into a democratic plan to provide affordable energy and eliminate fossil-fuel dependence.

Each step responds to an immediate problem but also exposes a deeper obstacle. Why should commercial secrecy conceal profits and investment decisions? Why should socially necessary energy remain private property? Who should decide what is produced and how resources are used?

This is the transitional method: developing a connected series of demands arising from present conditions that helps workers organise, discover the barriers to satisfying their needs and challenge capitalist control.

It is not a trick for making every campaign sound more radical, nor a fixed list of slogans to be repeated whatever the circumstances. Demands become transitional through the struggle waged for them, the organisations created to impose them and the way they point towards workers taking control. A programme must be tested and developed through experience.

Workers must control their struggles

The forms of organisation created in a struggle are as important as its demands. Union officials or campaign leaders may speak for workers while keeping decisions in their own hands. Workers need sovereign mass meetings, elected and recallable strike committees, effective picketing and direct links between workplaces and movements.

Such organisations allow those taking action to determine their own strategy, hold leaders to account and respond quickly when circumstances change. They can coordinate struggles that the official structures keep separate and begin to exercise control over matters usually reserved for employers and the state.

Workers’ control is not the same as consultation or participation in management. It means workers using their own organisations to inspect information, veto harmful decisions and impose measures against the owners’ wishes. It is therefore both a means of defending immediate interests and a school for running society.

Unity in action, independence in politics

Revolutionaries will usually be a minority when a struggle begins. We must be able to fight alongside people who support reformist parties, follow cautious union leaders or disagree with us on many questions.

The united front is an agreement for common action around a concrete objective. Revolutionaries seek the broadest effective mobilisation while retaining complete freedom to put forward their own policies, criticise retreat and explain what should happen next. Unity in action does not require political silence.

This method avoids two opposite errors. Sectarianism refuses common struggle unless everyone first accepts a revolutionary programme. Opportunism conceals revolutionary politics or abandons necessary demands in order to preserve an alliance with reformist leaders. The united front combines practical unity with political independence.

From workers’ control to workers’ power

Strikes, occupations and mass movements can bring workers into conflict with decisions made by employers and the state. Workplace committees can link with tenants, students and community organisations through councils of action or delegate assemblies. A general strike raises the question particularly sharply: who is actually running society?

In a revolutionary crisis, such bodies can begin to organise transport, food, communications, defence and production. Their authority grows while that of the capitalist government weakens. This situation—when institutions of workers’ power exist alongside the old state—is called dual power.

It cannot continue indefinitely. Either the working class takes power, dismantles the capitalist state and establishes a workers’ government based on its democratic organisations, or the ruling class restores its authority and breaks the movement.

A socialist revolution is therefore not a conspiracy or a single act performed by a minority. It is the culmination of a mass struggle in which workers create their own institutions, transform their understanding and become capable of governing society. Revolutionaries cannot manufacture this process, but they can help prepare for it through the battles taking place now.

Key terms

• Reform: a limited improvement won within capitalism.
• Reformism: a strategy based on gradually transforming society through existing capitalist institutions rather than overthrowing class rule.
• Capitalist state: the institutions that maintain capitalist social order and defend the property and power of the ruling class.
• Transitional method: connecting immediate needs to demands and forms of organisation that challenge capitalist ownership and develop workers’ power.
• United front: common action by different working-class organisations around an agreed objective, with each retaining its political independence.
• Dual power: a revolutionary situation in which institutions created by the working class compete with the capitalist state for authority.

Read and discuss

For a group session, everyone should read this guide and at least one of the two short introductory readings.

Start here

• Workers Power, R is for Reformism and Revolution — a short explanation of the reformist strategy and the class power standing behind parliament (about 6 minutes).
• Workers Power, Which road: reform or revolution? — a fuller account of why Marxists fight for reforms but reject a parliamentary road to socialism (about 10 minutes).

Go deeper

• Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution — particularly the introduction and the chapters ‘Capitalism and the State’ and ‘Conquest of Political Power’.
• Workers Power, The revolutionary programme — an introduction to the role of a programme and the transitional method in connecting present struggles to socialist revolution.

Questions for discussion

1. What is the difference between fighting for reforms and believing in reformism?
2. Why can reforms be both valuable and insecure?
3. Why might a government elected on a radical programme retreat without being directly overthrown?
4. What makes a demand transitional rather than simply more radical?
5. Why does the united front require both common action and freedom of criticism?
6. What kinds of organisation created in an everyday struggle could later contribute to workers’ power?

Activity: build a bridge from need to power

Choose an immediate issue such as low pay, unaffordable rent, a hospital closure or threatened job losses. Write down:

1. the urgent demand around which people could act now;
2. the information the employer, landlord or government is concealing;
3. the organisation needed for those affected to control the struggle;
4. how the struggle could be extended or coordinated;
5. the private ownership or state power standing in the way of a lasting solution.

Use this to construct a short chain of demands connecting the immediate fight to greater workers’ control.