What is Reformism? The British Case.

Let’s talk about “reformism”.

Once upon a time, that word (plus “reformist” and “reform”) had a precise meaning for Marxists. Over time, however, that meaning changed: the original nuances behind “reformism” were lost. Nowadays those are merely words of abuse.

Because of that it has become, paradoxically, possible to reclaim them. That would be a serious mistake and we might be running out of time for mistakes.

But before tackling “reformism”, it seems wiser to explain “reform” first. To make the discussion more accessible to the public and hopefully less dry, I’ll try an unusual approach.

Below is part of the first page of results I got from Googling the string “reform”.

“Reform” is a popular word (“About 253,000,000 results”), often employed within the context of public policy-making.

“Reform” involves changing an institution or practice to improve it. The links above, for example, use “reform” that way: an authority identifies something problematic within its area of competence, considers a series of options, selects one, and implements changes to improve that practice or institution.

That’s a way of understanding reform: discrete, separate events. It's something government bureaucracies do. In this conception, reform happens in all sorts of areas, normally without coordination: realistically, it’s hard to see how to coordinate reform in social services, shipping and vehicle road transport so that one reform facilitates others.

Because that usage is so common, the temptation is to extrapolate it to socialist politics. That’s deeply misleading. Unnecessarily so, in fact, because there are prominent examples of policy reform providing a much closer parallel with socialist politics.

Here’s Malcolm Sawyer explaining the meaning of the term “structural reforms”: “euphemism for de-regulation, lowering of social protection, constraining minimum wages etc.”.

A discussion about the desirability of those EC/ECB-imposed “structural reforms” is irrelevant here. What matters is that they are not isolated efforts; they are more or less gradually adopted and facilitate each other. Commitment to a balanced budget, for example, not only facilitates but indeed almost forces a “lowering of social protection”, which, in turn, contributes to “constraining minimum wages”.

Those reforms have a common goal: to push national economies more or less gradually towards laissez-faire capitalism.

Fabian tortoise: gradualism (source)

That view is much closer to what a truly reformist policy in the Marxist sense of the word should be: the use of the available rules and institutions of the political game to effect a gradual transition to socialism, much like elites employ those rules and institutions to effect gradual transitions to laissez-faire capitalism.

It’s worth highlighting that, against current mythology, “reform” and “reformism”, for reformist Marxists, were not statements against the ultimate desirability of socialism, at least in theory. They and revolutionary Marxists shared the goal of socialism. They, in other words, did not disagree on where they wanted to go, but on how to get there.

In effect, other socialists, too, allegedly shared that goal. This is a concrete example:

“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

Guess who wrote that? Go on, don’t be shy, pick one:

1. A sweaty, half-educated Communist firebrand of Jewish and/or Central/Eastern European stock just emerging from a coal mine in Wales.
2. A socially mobile and highly educated Englishman, transitioning from upper-middle class into peerage and frequent sight in salons of the best London society.

The answer isn’t [1]. Its author was Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield: a leading Fabian socialist.

What was behind Lord Webb’s words? Sincere belief? Political gimmick? Your guess is as good as mine. What is certain is that the UK Labour Party (which the Fabians had helped found) adopted that passage in 1918: Clause IV (C-IV from now on).

In principle, that adoption turned Labour into a reformist party.

What happened, then?

Short-lived coat of arms, allegedly
adopted (!?) by the Fabian Society. [A]

Opposition to C-IV ensued, at first falling nothing short of hysteria. By 1919 it was feared that within two years Britain would turn into another Soviet Union, Gulags and all; City businessmen and economists were publicly demanding the lynching of Ramsay MacDonald (another Fabian and Labour leader) as a “traitor”, before it was too late.

Hysteria eventually subsided, but opposition to C-IV and what it implied just changed its tone. I suppose it’s evident C-IV never led to a totalitarian socialist takeover of Britain. Whatever the intention behind it, Labour never acted towards that goal. The Fabian tortoise never did strike.

That’s not to say Labour and the Fabians did not pursue reforms. In effect during almost 80 years many of the individual reforms the Fabians supported were adopted and many were, indeed, beneficial to the British working class. Often, that is credited to them.

I’m in no position to refute that categorically: it’s possible, if questionable. However, how many such Fabian reforms were adopted is something I haven’t seen clearly stated anywhere. Nor have I seen it demonstrated that they were adopted because the Fabians supported them: after all, if Fabians were so influential, how come they were rather unsuccessful in pushing their eugenic reforms?

That’s an important issue. It’s also relevant. Eugenics was part and parcel of the ideology of a who’s-who of the non-Marxist (anti-Marxist, perhaps, would be more appropriate) liberal-leftish upper-middle class in early-20th century Britain (you really need to check that link). According to George Bernard Shaw, one of the founding luminaries of the Fabian Society: "The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man." One can't dismiss interest in eugenics as some kookier characters' mere hobby: at least some of the most influential Fabians took eugenics as seriously (if not more) than whatever commitment they had to socialism.

They had the support of key Tories, beginning with Francis Galton himself and including Winston Churchill (to say nothing of his "dog", a real-life Dr. Strangelove). The situation was similar in the US. And yet, in the US (or Sweden or Nazi Germany), where Fabian presence was marginal, eugenic reforms were enthusiastically adopted to an extent far surpassing whatever done in Britain: Fabian presence wasn’t a necessary condition. In Britain, where there was plenty of Fabian education, agitation, and organisation (to paraphrase Shaw) there were little concrete results in eugenics: Fabian presence wasn’t a sufficient condition, either.

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Over those near 80 years, opposition to C-IV -- more precisely opposition to a resolutely leftist Labour -- never ceased, both within and without Labour. Whatever Webb’s original intent, C-IV was successively amended and watered down, until little more than its symbolic value as statement of commitment to the working class was left  (or until it became plain dead letter, if you like). Whether that obeyed a master strategy (similar but opposed to the perceived Fabian conspiracy embodied in C-IV) or not is moot. The general rationale was to make Labour more electable, more palatable to the middle classes, which by then had supposedly turned much less radical. That rationale was enough to provide anti-C-IV Labour the consistency which pro-C-IV Labour lacked.

Consistency prevailed and over time Labour drifted towards the right. The wolf in sheep's clothing ended up as a sheep in wolf's clothing.

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In 1995, 77 years after its adoption, Clause IV became history. That event signaled the end of the reformation of the Labour Party into New Labour. From being a reformist party -- in theory if not in praxis -- into one openly “neoliberal”: it only took for Labour to drop C-IV. Say bye bye to the “Fabian reforms", kids. Sobering, isn’t it?

Tony Blair is seen as the chief architect of that. That overstates his importance. The man was just a mediocrity and an opportunist: the last in a chain of “centrist” reformists. It’s often understated that Blair had many examples to draw from: Hugh Gaitskell as early as the 1950s; during the late 1970s-early 1980s Neil Kinnock and the “Gang of Four” (actually, 28 sitting Labour MPs, elected with Labour votes and Labour support who defected in protest against an ascending Tony Been and the mythical Trotskyist takeover of Labour, rings a bell?).

If one believes his Wikipedia profile, the evolution of Robert Skidelsky’s political stance illustrates this shift: he started out as a Labourite; from Labour he moved to the anti-Bennite SDP, and then to the Liberals (now, Liberal Democrats), to end (?) with the Conservatives.

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The non-British may find it hard to understand, but that wasn’t a strictly internal Labour affair, by any means. From a theoretical stand point, Blair had full support of the … Fabian Society! Wonderful, isn’t it?

In fact, perhaps Blair would be reluctant to thank them, but some kind of Marxists also contributed to his historical achievement: the New-Left-kind of Marxist, the Eurocommunist-kind, like Eric Hobsbawm (who thereby became the darling of the Guardian), and Marxism Today the official organ of the reformist wing of the Communist Party of Britain.

Reformists not only divide and hinder the socialist movement, they fail at achieving their stated goals. To top it all off, their very follies become weapons the enemies of socialism deploy against those who always opposed reformism (compare this odious hack writer's account of British eugenics to Brignell's to see where the former jumped the shark).

You’ve gotta love reformism. Wolves in sheep's clothing indeed.

Image Credits:
[A] "Fabian Society coat of arms, a wolf in sheep’s clothing". 1884. Author: Fabian Society. File in the public domain, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. My usage of the image in no way suggests the author endorses me or the use I make of it.