Reformism

The revisionism dispute

The theoretical formulation of reformism came from Bernstein. In Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (1899) he argued that the prospect of capitalist breakdown had not materialized, that credit institutions and cartels moderated crises, and that workers' living standards and political rights were expanding. The conclusion followed that socialism is reached through an accumulation of reforms rather than by a leap after collapse.

Kautsky and Luxemburg answered him. In Reform or Revolution (1899) Luxemburg argued that accumulated reforms do not change the character of capitalism and that the significance of the struggle for reforms lies not in their own results but in forming the organization and consciousness of the working class. The dispute was settled by the formal rejection of revisionism at the congresses of 1899 and 1903, though in practice the party's work had already been recast around parliament and the unions.

Institutional form

Reformism was an organizational form as much as a theoretical position. In a structure combining mass trade unions, a parliamentary party, cooperatives, and mutual aid societies, the survival of the organizations themselves required a stable institutional environment, and that requirement bore on strategic judgement. The logic of preserving organization that Luxemburg identified in the mass strike debate points to this.

The First World War exposed the problem dramatically. When the majority of German Social Democracy voted for war credits the international socialist movement split, and the separation of reformism from revolutionary socialism ended in organizational division.

The twentieth century

In postwar Western Europe social democratic parties accumulated substantive reformist achievements through the construction of welfare states and full-employment policy. Argument in this period shifted from the abolition of capitalism to how far distribution and power relations could be altered within it.

The period after the 1980s reopened the question. As earlier gains were rolled back under liberalized capital movement and fiscal constraint, the reversibility of reform itself became the point at issue. What the critique of reformism addresses today is not the futility of reforms but the reversibility of reforms that leave the structural power of capital in place.