Managing Barbarism, Reformism and the Political Disarming of the Working Class

At a time of deepening crisis, when capitalism offers nothing but exploitation, war, and ecological collapse, its historic contradictions have burst violently to the surface. Now undeniable in their barbarism, the vulgarity of imperialism is  ever clearer through the genocide in Palestine, the imperialist war in Ukraine, and the sustained attacks on the living standards of the working class globally. This vicious assault has coincided with a profound retreat of the organised working class following the counter-revolutions of the 1990s. In the last decade, we have witnessed the resurgence of a range of political forces, ethno-nationalism, Keynesianism, social democracy, and left-radicalism, each feeding on widespread popular discontent with a social-economic system that has long outlived its usefulness to humanity. What unites these tendencies is that none seek to abolish the capitalist relations of production, and therefore none confront the root cause of exploitation itself. Instead, they aim to manage capitalism, to soften or restrain its most vicious expressions. In doing so, they politically disarm the working class, diverting it away from independent struggle and leading it down a road to nowhere.

In the last decade, left-radicalism has re-entered the political field in a form not seen since the “New left” movements of  the 1960s. It has registered a series of political “victories” most recently the election of Mamdani as Mayor of New York, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and prominent social democrats such as Bernie Sanders, and, more locally, the election of Catherine Connolly as President of Ireland, supported by a slate of opposition parties of the social democratic and radical left. What distinguished these campaigns from others was a tactical shift. Having exhausted the mobilising capacity of post-modern identity politics, which dominated left-radicalism for years, they pivoted towards questions of the cost of living crisis and material hardship. This shift was a result of not a break with reformism, but an adaptation to mounting social economic  pressure on the working class produced by capitalist relations. The defining characteristic of left-radicalism is its complete political dependence on a symbiotic relationship with social democracy. Far from constituting an alternative to it, left-radicalism now functions as its left wing, providing militant and sometimes revolutionary rhetoric while remaining firmly within the strategic limits of reformism. As a result, it performs the same essential role: the political disarming of the working class as an independent force. This is what we consider to be the character of left-radicalism in the current period.

To understand how this political disarmament takes place, it is necessary to examine the strategy of reformism itself, its social basis, and the relationship between the two. While the tactical forms adopted by left-radical organisations vary across countries, political traditions, and economic conditions, their underlying strategy remains consistent. Politics is reduced to a series of campaigns organised around isolated issues, electoral interventions, or policy demands, with the stated aim of pressuring the existing state to enact reforms or, in securing a role in government, managing capitalism within the existing political framework. This strategic orientation treats political mobilisation and campaigns as an end in itself, removed from the day-to-day economic life of the working class and from the exploitation of capitalist relations. Class struggle is replaced by campaigning, deep-rooted organisation is substituted with mobilisations and fronts. Most importantly the question of power is reduced to representation within bourgeois institutions. The capitalist system itself remains relatively unexamined and untouched, while the material conditions of workers are addressed only insofar as they can be translated into policy proposals. In this way, left-radicalism reproduces the core logic of reformism. By orienting struggle exclusively towards the political role of the state, while leaving the economic base of capitalism intact, it trains workers to act as campaigners rather than as a class capable of exercising independent power. The result is not the development of class consciousness or organisation, but its erosion,  diverting energy down the dead end of reformism, and leaving the underlying system of capitalist exploitation free to continue with its barbaric assaults.

To say that the issue with left-radicalism and social democracy is just one of the correct strategy is wrong. What ultimately informs this strategy, and all other political strategies, is the social base which the tendency represents. Reformist strategies exist not because the proponents are ill-informed or do not know their history, but because these strategies correspond to the material interests and social position of those who form them. The social base of contemporary left-radicalism and social democracy lies in both the petty bourgeoisie and in a relatively privileged strata of the working class (labour aristocracy). This includes professionals, NGO workers, trade union officials and sections of organised labour whose position within economies of an advanced position in the imperialist world system affords them a degree of stability and insulation from the most brutal expressions of capitalist exploitation. For this stratum, capitalism does not manifest as an immediate and existential threat but is instead a system which can be negotiated with and ultimately reformed to improve their own position. This social position provides a political outlook hostile to the revolutionary transformation of society. That upheaval and historic confrontation is ultimately volatile and violent, as the producing classes rip the parasitic exploiters from power. This upheaval runs the risk of removing the petty-bourgeois and labour aristocracy from its relatively privileged position on both the domestic and international social stratums and classes and thus together form the backbone of reformist politics, supplying its leadership, organisational infrastructure and its ideology. Reformism is  a structural inability to lead the revolutionary overthrowing of society and the abolition of exploitation. As a result reformism does not merely mislead the working class but actively substitutes the interests of the privileged stratum and petty bourgeois for the historic interests of the proletariat, that of socialism-communism. 

Reformism in all its forms has thus existed for as long as its social base has. It is a recurring tendency that arises under definite material and historical conditions. The origins of reformism can be traced back to the mass socialist parties within the Second International at the end of the nineteenth century. This period was marked by the rapid concentration and centralisation of capital and the subsequent proletarianisation of more of the population within the advanced capitalist countries. These new imperialist powers now also began, as a result of the uneven development of capitalism and the increasing necessity for the export of capital, to extract super profits from their colonies in Africa and Asia, which allowed the domestic bourgeoisie to offer significant concessions to sections of the working class. This process produced a privileged stratum within the working class, the labour aristocracy. Reformism emerged organically from this relatively comfortable stratum, expressing their narrow short term interests and outlook rather than the working class as a whole. For this section of the working class, the expansion of parliamentary institutions and democratic rights, as well as the increase in wages and the legalisation of trade unions in many countries in the early 20th century, cemented opportunist conceptions that gradual reforms were attainable through parliamentary and legalistic routes. They found ideological cover in the intellectuals and leaders of the Second International, who took Marx’s revolutionary theory as a dogma and revised it, selectively applying it to advocate a focus on trade union politics to gradually raise wages and improve the position of their domestic working class, while ignoring the logic and basic laws of capitalism and the bourgeois state.  

The First World War destroyed the progressive face of reformism with brutal clarity. Given a choice between proletarian internationalism and loyalty to their bourgeois states, the social democratic parties overwhelmingly chose the latter, voting for war credits and backing their national bourgeoisie at the hopes of securing some concessions. This support for an inter-imperalist war led to the butchering of millions of the working class. Never was this a question of morality, neither was it an accidental tactical mistake, it was the logical outcome of a politics rooted in adaptation and subservience to the bourgeois state and nationalism. Reformism proved incapable of leading the working class independently through a systemic crisis.

Following the Second World War and the Great Anti-Fascist Victory of the Peoples, social democracy underwent a temporary revival across much of the Western Imperialist bloc. Welfare states were expanded, massive public infrastructure projects, social programmes institutionalised and full employment maintained for a short period of time. Reformists have pointed to this era of capitalism as evidence that capitalism can be reformed in the interests of the working class. This narrative is false and leaves out that the nature of these gains were not the product of a more humane capitalism but the result of exceptional historical pressures imposed on capitalism from without.

Decisive among these pressures was the existence of the Soviet Union as a living, material alternative to the barbarism of capitalism, a system that had brought humanity two imperialist wars over the course of the last 50 years. The Red Army’s defeat of nazi-fascism and the subsequent revolutions and consolidation of the socialist bloc fundamentally altered the global correlation of forces in favour of the proletariat. For the first time, capitalist states not only faced internal contradictions and unrest but an external system which had abolished private ownership of the means of production and demonstrated, in practice, that another system was not only possible, but superior in providing the needs of the working class. In the west, mass communist parties, strengthened by the leading role they played in the anti-facisit resistance, had the loyalty of millions of workers. Coupled with the overthrowing of the colonial system by oppressed peoples in Africa and Asia, with significant support from the socialist bloc, revolution in the advanced imperialist countries seem a concrete possibility. 

It was under these conditions that the bourgeoisie resorted to concessions. Welfare states, expansion of social rights and nationalisation of some key industries were not granted to advance working class power but to stem the tide of the proletarian revolution. Social democracy functioned as the principal political instrument in which these concessions were administered. By presenting these reforms as the product of social partnership, the social democrats stifled the rising class consciousness amongst the working class, detaching them from revolutionary politics. The post-war economic boom due to the rise of profitability of investments following the immense destruction of WW2, provided the material basis for this strategy. Allowing capital to temporarily accommodate reforms without significantly impacting accumulation. But these reforms were neither secure nor universal, as they relied on continued growth of profits and above all the existence of the socialist camp. When that pressure diminished, so did the willingness of capital to tolerate reforms. 

The dismantling of the welfare states in the 1970s onwards and the implementation of austerity following the temporary victory of the counter-revolution in the USSR in the 1980s, was capital’s attempt to claw back the many concessions won by workers. Once again the real historical role of reformism is exposed. Deprived of an external threat in the Soviet Union internationally, and with domestic communist parties hollowed out from decades of reformism which removed them from their working class base, the social democrats’ transitioned seamlessly into administrators of neoliberal capitalism, managers of the most vicious assault on the working class since the imperialist wars. 

What is missing out of the above historiography is left-radicalism. It and social-democracy must ultimately be viewed as two sides of the same coin. The significance of each other is dictated by the stability of capitalism in a given historic period. They arise from the same social basis, advance the same political assumptions and ultimately share the same purpose. Social democracy tends to dominate during periods of capitalist stability. Left-radicalism by contrast, resurges during periods of capitalist crisis and political instability. When social democracy is discredited, usually with eroded support from its time in government, Left-radicalism steps in to capture popular anger and restore faith in political solutions that stop short of revolution. Its language is more confrontational, its symbolism and rhetoric sometimes takes a revolutionary tone but what is important in assessing these organisations is not its form but its content. 

None better than to analyse then our own domestic left-radical organisation, People Before Profit. PBP represents a clear expression of contemporary left-radicalism that has re-emerged in Europe since the 2008 financial crash. It frequently employs anti-capitalist language and positions itself as the voice of protest in Irish politics. However, in this radical form there is a fundamentally reformist content concealed. The party’s strategy remains confined to parliamentary representation, issue-based campaigning and pressure on the bourgeois state to enact reforms. Capitalism is criticised, but never confronted as a system to overthrow. Nothing is more revealing than the party’s almost rabid support for a “left-goverment”, which exposes their main aim. In recent years, this has expressed itself in the electoral “Vote Left, Transfer Left” tactic, an open Left-radical and social democratic collaboration, which would, if votes allowed for it, install a “left coalition” into government in the 26 counties. It aims to rally as much support of the working class by campaigning on single issues in order to achieve electoral victories to have a shot at its turn of managing the barbarous system of capitalism, more than likely as the minority in this coalition. What is lacking is why and how does this strategy advance the interests of the working class beyond modest reforms that can be pulled back at the next crisis in capitalism. The lack of a programme, various eclectic views emerging from open factionalism ranging from social democracy, trotskyism to even Kautskyism(ha!) results in an underwhelmingly weak party which can even be doubted to extract the weakest of reforms in a left-government coalition. Ultimately, this will result in the downfall of the party itself, as history has shown for all left-radical parties that have found themselves managing this brutal system of exploitation, from Syriza in Greece to the Podemos in Spain both having been ushered in off the back of popular discontent of the economic system, all failing to address said system, all relegated to the dustbin of history. And the working class none the better for it. 

The history of reformism, in all its various manifestations, leads to the unavoidable conclusion that capitalism cannot be managed in the interests of the working class. Whether in the form of social democracy in government or left-radicalism in opposition. Reformism’s main function is one of maintaining class power relations, that of the bourgeoisie, while containing, diverting and neutralising the working class’ independent struggle. Its persistence and relevance derives from its origins in the strata of the labour aristocracy and petty-bourgeoisie, whose material interests are in stability and the preservation of their relatively advanced position in capitalist society. At every historic epoch, reformism has revealed its true nature, denying any independent political power to the working class and in the worst circumstances, sending them to the butchering block of imperialist war. When capitalism appears in crisis, reformism takes on a new form in left-radicalism, but its content remains the same, channeling anger into campaigns and electoral campaigns. It promises humane capitalism, more progressive management, or a gradual transition to workers power. What is more humane, more progressive of a system which only brings misery, hunger, homelessness and war for the vast majority of its participants? The cycle of hope and anger directed into these reformist projects and subsequent betrayal and demoralisation does not prepare the working class for socialism. Rather, it prepares the ground for reaction. 

Against the dead end of reformism stands Marxism-Leninism. The emancipation of the working class cannot be achieved from begging the existing capitalist state, nor through precipitation in its management. It requires the conscious orientation of the proletariat as an independent political force, armed with a revolutionary programme and oriented towards the revolutionary overthrow of society and a complete end of exploitation of man by man. Thus, our task is not to dress up the stinking corpse of reformism in more radical language but to break from it entirely. This means rejecting the illusions that capitalism can be reformed and by rebuilding the revolutionary workers movement oriented towards class struggle and proletarian internationalism. A movement capable of confronting the barbarism of the present epoch and to fulfill its historic mission of socialism-communism.