Hypotheses on the Solution of the 'Reform-
vs.-Revolution'
"Contradiction" for the Present Global Socio-Political-Economic Crisis:
To posit "reform" and "revolution" as two absolutely separate and opposed processes
— as do so many of today's self-degenerating,
pseudo-Marxians (e.g., Leninists, neo-Malthusian "Marxists", etc.) — is
an example of the most crippling kind of UN-dialectical, self-defeating thinking.
Since such thinking is UN-dialectical — and since actuality IS dialectical
[i.e., is a process of potentially-progressive cumulative development, self-mediated
by self-opposition] — such thinking leads to the most abject failures in practice.
There can be no "revolution" which is absolutely disconnected from its historical
and recent past; which is an absolute re-beginning of the world, from scratch.
There can be no "revolution" which does not involve elements of "reform" (i.e.,
of the self-transformative, self-remoulding of the only material available, the
material of the past-become-present).
The concept of "absolute" revolution is a delusory abstraction, a figment of the
imagination, "absolutely" impossible as an actuality.
Such thinking about revolution makes revolution a «utopia»
— a "nowhere" — a place of which it must be said that "you can't get
there from here."
Likewise, there can be no "reform" that does not contain the possibility —
and that does not increase the probability, however minimally — of triggering
a "point of no return" for and to the old social system; of triggering more than
reform, of triggering a revolutionary transition.
That is why ruling classes are so averse to reform, and, sometimes, why, by resisting
even the merest reforms for too long, and by means too brutal, they may precipitate
revolution anyway — by trying to forestall reform.
The key to successful revolution today, it seems to us, is to locate the embryo
of the new, successor system to capitalism, within the
present, predecessor system of that successor system; within
the Capital-relation as the present, predominate "social relation of production",
to use Marx's term.
Having located that embryo, it should then be possible to chart a path of successively
accessible reforms, which, if that path is followed, will lead to a revolutionary
"point of no return", and to a supercession of the capitalist system, in a new,
higher, better system of quantitatively AND QUALITATIVELY SELF-EXPANDING
human societal self-reproduction.
However, to be able to locate the embryo of the new system within the old, one has to
have a clear understanding of what the old system is, and
thereby, be enabled to form an inkling — indeed, a relatively concrete vision
— of what that new system must look like.
The legacy left by Marx and Engels, in terms of envisioning the successor system
to the capitals-system, is not very helpful in that regard, in any detail.
The legacy left by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ceaucescu, etc., «ad
nauseam», is a very detailed legacy of a
NON-successor to capitalism;
of totalitarian, police-state dictatorship and terror by the state-bureaucracy
— as a substitute capitalist ruling-class for a missing, or stunted,
private capitalist ruling-class — against the working
class; a legacy of proto-STATE-CAPITALISM,
not of true communism; not of the social system of "the associated producers" [Marx].
However, utilizing those few loci in the extant writings of Marx and Engels where
they sketch the new social system that they hold can "lawfully" arise out of
capitalism via revolutionary reform — if we avoid
the abyss of failed "reforms" and failed "revolutions", all leading to "the mutual
ruin of the contending classes" — we claim as follows:
The capitalist ruling class will, of course, ideologically — and violently — resist
even these non-violent reforms.
Their very resistance will further educate a 'populist' public, pressing for these reforms,
to the need for a revolutionary re-constitution of capitalist society, into
Equitarian society — into that real "communist society", that Political-Economic Democracy — which Marx, Engels, and the rest of the real communist movement, meant by that term.
That term does NOT
mean the totalitarian, multi-genocidal STATE-CAPITALIST
dictatorship, which is, in fact, the self-destination
and the self-destiny of
UN-resisted decadence-phase
capitalism, and of its decadence-phase ruling class — e.g., the core ruling
class and the rest of the society that we
constitute and reproduce today.
For further details, see: