The Trump election brought numerous horrifying political developments in the federal government as well as the growth of (organized) fascist violence. However, the growth of the left and workers’ struggles counter those serious developments. The declaration of the “death of the left and the working class” seems to have been premature given the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a new wave of elected officials who are self-identified socialists and members of socialist organizations, a wave of teachers’ strikes, and new organizing in the social sphere to list a few counter-narratives. These inspiring developments surface questions of reforms and reformism with different political contexts and meanings. The question of reformism is no longer a question of posturing among small groups– it has real strategic significance in the here and now as well as long-term implications that are more real today than they have been for decades. In this context, advocates of electoral paths to socialism have outlined their strategy that places great importance on non-reformist and universal reforms.
In a brief intervention into this debate, Tim Horras from Philly Socialists makes an argument against the strategy of non-reformist reforms in his article “Reforms are just reforms.” In it, Horras argues that non-reformist reforms makes reforms out to be something they are not. While certain reforms may have a positive impact on the working class, they do not add up over time and weaken capitalism. Our ability to win reforms does not readily translate into our ability to end capitalism. Reforms are, in the end, just reforms. While Horras is correct to push back against the almost teleological view of reforms presented by advocates of non-reformist reforms, his alternative view leaves much to be desired. In trying to break from a linear connection between the struggle for reforms and socialist transition, Horras ends up leaving a gap between our current struggles and our long-term goals. Horras’s criticisms reproduce key errors of the argument for the non-reformist reforms he denounces. Instead of a rejection of non-reformist reforms that takes the reformist account on its own terms, we need a new strategy for approaching questions of reforms that takes into account the flaws of the non-reformist reform framework.
Problem with Non Reformist Reforms
People from a wide-range of tendencies on the left adapt “non-reformist reforms” to their needs, often superficially. To provide some clarity, I will highlight two of the main uses. Philosopher and journalist Andre Gorz developed the concept of non-reformist reforms. For Gorz, reformist reforms are reforms that are reconciled with the needs of the capitalist class. They do not seek to undermine to destroy the capitalist system as opposed to “non reformist reforms” which are reforms that directly attack capitalism with the goal of destroying it.
Contemporary advocates of non-reformist reforms take this a step further. They position reforms that not only weaken capital but also make it more possible for the working class to organize and assert their power. The current popular reform that is touted as a non-reformist reform is Medicare for All. The advocates, of this view assert that nationalizing health insurance, hospitals, and medical services would severely weaken capitalists’ hold on the working class. Workers would no longer have to worry about losing their healthcare if they were to lose their job by going on strike or trying to organize. This would embolden workers to take more risks.
Both the strategy of non-reformist reforms as formulated by Gorz and by current proponents are deeply flawed. Not just that, current proponents present a version that misrepresents and misuses Gorz. However, before getting into any criticism of either conception of non-reformist reforms, it’s important to recognize the obvious if partial truth of the second formulation. Laws and reforms clearly impact class struggle and working-class organizations. Laws like Taft-Hartley make militant action difficult. Repealing such laws would free workers from the negative consequences of shop floor and direct action. Similarly, one cannot deny that reforms which make workers less precarious during strike action and organizing make these things easier to do.
The problem is that the reality of reforms, whether they have reformist or non-reformist intention, is very different. According to both Gorz and current proponents of non-reformist reforms, the strategy depends on the reforms being winnable., The winnability of a reform does not speak to the exact content of a reform when it gets enacted. Reforms will often contain concessions to capitalism– its more radical elements watered down– and new provisions added. This is a risk when dealing with reforms that are won by means that do not create high stakes for capitalists and the government if they do not enact the reform. Until the strength and organizational level of the working class is such that it creates these challenges to capitalists and the state, any major reform is going to be much more limited if enacted than the proponents of non-reformist reforms envision.
Non-reformist reforms as advocated by Gorz run into the issue of the limitations of using the capitalist state as vehicle for transition, movements losing steam, and the socialist coalition caving and reconciling with capitalists. Whereas contemporary advocates are even more vulnerable to these issues as they attempt to make limited reforms without a strong mass working-class movement, the potential for institutionalization and compromise is great, a danger that Gorz heavily warns against. For Gorz, the strategy already assumes a mature workers movement, one that has had numerous shows of strength through things such as mass strikes. Gorz explicitly states “[i]f the socialist revolution is not immediately possible, neither is the realization of reforms immediately destructive of capitalism.” Reforms that are immediately destructive to capitalism are what non-reformist reforms are by Gorz’s original formulation. This is clearly distinct from what contemporary advocates present as non-reformist reforms and refers to a very different articulation of class struggle. Instead, the current use of “non-reformist reforms” refers to reforms meant to help kick start or facilitate the process of growth and strengthening of the working-class movement before it is able to bring capitalism to the brink of destruction. The reforms they advocate are not especially disruptive let alone destructive to capitalism as we can see with single-payer health care and the Medicare for All campaign.
The actual policy of Medicare for All put forward by advocacy groups is very limited, the actual bill even more so. It does not put forward a nationalization of insurance, only the expansion of a public option, leaving private insurance companies relatively untouched. It does not involve nationalization of hospitals and other treatment facilities. Even if it were to include all those things, the model for a more complete Medicare for All that advocates point to– the British and Swedish national healthcare services– demonstrate that such a reform does not actually threaten and destabilize capitalism. A national healthcare service does not decommodify healthcare as advocates claim. While it makes healthcare accessible, it does not touch pharmaceuticals– outside of limited price controls– or tech industries attached to health care which pressure the nationalized aspects of health care policy through market influences. Medicare for All and single-payer falls short of the standards of a non-reformist reform.
By labeling reforms as non-reformist in nature, we lose sight of the fact that reforms that we win do not on their own translate into increased working-class militancy or organizing. After winning a reform, the working class could demobilize, leaving no permanent organization. Even worse, as a part of the compromise, provisions might be included that could end creating new avenues for the capitalist class or state to fight or prevent class struggle. Reforms can themselves be applied in ways that increase divisions among the working class along the lines of race or legal status. However, if the working class forms organization that can sustain militancy to resist attempts to introduce such measures and reignite struggles if subsequent laws are pushed through to neuter the previous victory, long-term impacts of the compromises can be swung in favor of workers.
In the end, what determines outcomes and long-term impacts of a reform is not the content of the reform itself (though it is not irrelevant) but how the struggle is fought and the ability of the working class to continue fighting. The value of a particular reform is not in its ability to destabilize capitalism or strengthen workers in the abstract as there is always a gap between the hypothetical reform and the reform in reality. Contemporary advocates in trying to shoehorn the strategy of non-reformist reforms into a context in which they were explicitly not meant for both abstract and specific reforms from reality and gloss over real dangers or strategic barriers that can have far reaching repercussions. The value of a reform comes from its relationship to class struggle and concrete changes in the balance of forces between the working class and the capitalist class.
Blind Spots of Reforms are Just Reforms
As I have shown above there are many flaws with the non-reformist reform framework. However, the alternative view that Horras provides to non-reformist reforms presents an equally flawed and simplistic view. For Horras, reforms are concessions that capitalists are forced to give but are still things that are fundamentally compatible with the capitalist system. In this way, Horras and advocates of non-reformist reforms see reforms through their positive impacts on the working class– in Horras’s case, as concessions limited by capitalism and what capitalists are willing to give. This presents reforms in an uncomplicated manner, ignoring their internal contradictions.
Because reforms are products of class struggle, compromises between the working class and capitalists are mere concessions. They are not independent from larger class struggle. Reforms can have long-term impact on class struggle. Advocates of non-reformist reforms discovered a rational kernel in this perspective, but this impact is not always positive. A reform might give workers greater protections or improve their lives but might be also set up institutions or pathways that make collective or militant struggle harder or even deepen divisions in class along race or legal status. Horras’s formulation ignores this. In his attempt to push back against the ways contemporary advocates of non reformist reforms misrepresent the nature of specific reforms, he ignores the long-term impact of reforms on class struggle. If these impacts were just positive, this blind spot would not be serious, but these impacts have the potential to severely undermine the working class. To have this blind spot is dangerous.
To the extent that Horras does recognize that reforms are compromises, they do not impact the fundamental relationship or shift the balance of power. This is a problem in two ways. First, it falls into the same problem as above, as it’s not just that capitalists will try to protect their power but also create new methods of exerting that power to control the working class. Secondly, it is not true that reforms do not impact the balance of power or how the capitalist class is able to exert its power. Democratic reforms– limits placed on the functioning of oppressive wings of the state and reforms that allow for more freedom in organizing– all impact the ability of the capitalist class to wield power both in and outside of the confines of the state. Through these reforms, the balance of power can shift, even slightly, more in favor of workers. This matters for how we think about the relationship between reforms and class struggle. This should not lead us to believe that reforms in and of themselves can destabilize capitalism or stack in such a way that allows us to exit capitalism nor should we see the state as the primary means to advance workers’ interests. However, it does mean that we can and should think about this potentially strategic relationship.
This is where Horras creates a massive strategic gap. By ignoring the long-term impact that reforms can have on class struggle and power in general, a divide is created between our everyday practice of fighting for reforms or concessions and our long-term revolutionary goals. There is nothing that links our practical work to revolution, and revolution becomes relegated to advocacy. It is not desirable to imagine that reforms are something that they are not. However, they produce interest in “non-reformist reforms” or “transitional demands” to address the very real problem of needing to link the everyday work to the revolutionary. The more that revolution becomes something distant and detached from everyday strategy, the more room there is for reformism to position itself as the realistic practice and subsequently, the more reformist our practice becomes itself.
This reality produces another danger: an outright rejection of struggles for reforms. If reforms and revolution have little connection, well-intentioned revolutionaries might arrive to the conclusion that struggling for reforms will always lead to reformism and is then something to be opposed. For basebuilding organizations, this can lead to a vision of producing organizations that take provide alternative services as a means to build up an alternative state. These organizations are vulnerable to succumbing to pressures from the market or the need for funding and support that can lead them to latch onto the state or in search of wealthy donors.
It is not enough to reject the assumptions of non-reformist reforms. We must produce a different strategic relationship to reforms and fights in and around the state. This is vital if we want to link our practical work outside of revolutionary situations to our long-term goals.
Alternatives
Unlike democratic socialists whose strategy is based around working through the existing state (and in the process transforming it), revolutionaries have always maintained a need to smash the capitalist state. This position when combined with the realities facing us in this age of austerity and when our programs include reforms that expand the reach of the state creates a difficult dilemma. This dilemma is not a new one. Stuart Hall described a similar situation within the context of intense austerity of the Thatcher government.
“On the one hand, we not only defend the welfare side of the state, we believe it should be massively expanded. And yet, on the other hand, we feel there is something deeply anti-socialist about how this welfare state functions. We know, indeed, that it is experienced by masses of ordinary people, in the very moment that they are benefiting from it, as an intrusive managerial, bureaucratic force in their lives. However, if we go too far down that particular road, whom do we discover keeping us company along the road but – of course – the Thatcherites, the new Right, the free market ‘hot gospellers,’ who seem (whisper it not too loud) to be saying rather similar things about the state. Only they are busy making capital against us on this very point, treating widespread popular dissatisfaction with the modes in which the beneficiary parts of the state function as fuel for an anti-Left, ‘roll back the state’ crusade. And where, to be honest, do we stand on the issue? Are we for ‘rolling back the state’– including the welfare state? Are we for or against the management of the whole of society by the state? Not for the first time, Thatcherism here catches the Left on the hop– hopping from one uncertain position to the next, unsure of our ground.”
This contradiction has also been noted by opponents of revolutionary roads to socialism, using it to counterposition unrealistic revolutionary strategies to more realistic roads through the existing state. If we propose a genuine alternative to social democratic and democratic road strategies, we cannot simply appropriate their orientation to reforms nor can we ignore the need to bridge the gap between our struggle for reforms and our revolutionary goals. Nonetheless, rigid models for revolution that seek to shoehorn strategies and mindsets for periods revolutionary upheaval to our non-revolutionary context are also not helpful. As Marxist political sociologist and philosopher Nicos Poulantzas noted in State, Power, and Socialism: “A ‘model’ of the State of transition to socialism cannot be drawn up: not as a universal model capable of being concretized in given cases, nor even as an infallible, theoretically guaranteed recipe for one or several countries. […] We have to make a choice once and for all: and as we now know, one cannot ask any theory, however scientific it may be, to give more than it possesses – not even Marxism, which remains a genuine theory of action. There is always a structural distance between theory and practice, between theory and the real.”
An orientation to reforms has to be grounded in the material. A rigid model— no matter how clever— will always face the divide between an abstract conceptualization and the concrete reality of implementation. To bring the gap between the present and a future revolutionary moment, I propose a set of questions to orient our work for reforms:
- How is the struggle for a reform being fought?
- What sections of the working class is engaging in the struggle?
- What organizational forms is the struggle creating?
- Is this struggle putting pressure on fault lines in the State?
How is the struggle for the reform being fought?
There are a variety of methods for socialists and the working class to utilize in their fight for reforms. These methods can involve more or less engagement from the working class. One particularly popular method today is canvassing. Canvassing is a popular method among liberal advocacy groups. Often meant to educate people about why particular reforms are necessary and to encourage people to contact their legislators in support of a particular bill or to vote in a certain way to help get a reform passed. Similarly, another popular strategy among labor bureaucrats and liberal advocacy groups is direct lobbying. While this is the primary mode for liberal engagement in politics, the left has also made extensive use of this. For the DSA, one major campaigns is canvassing for Medicare for All. In the end, this method requires that workers remain fairly passive and are relatively ineffective, especially when faced with a government that is either uncaring or outright hostile to reforms.
Alternatively, one can run left-wing candidates for elected office. Once elected, they can introduce reforms. While having elected officials can help with the passage of reforms, the small number of elected officials we currently have is insufficient to get any major reform passed on their own, especially given the lack of independent organizational structure to support them. Even if we did have a significant number, there is a long history of barriers that left electoral projects have been faced with due to structural pressures of the state. These failures can have a negative impact on broader working class struggle, leaving the movements that brought them into government demobilized or demoralized.
In the end, in order to get reforms passed, especially in a form that closer to original demands, our mode of struggle must impose high costs for not compromising with us. It is often noted by all sections of the left, including Democratic roaders, that strikes are the most effective way for workers to win demands. This is true not only from individual capitalists but also the state. Just recently, West Virginia teachers, when faced with a bill that would attack public education, chose to strike. After one day on strike, the bill was indefinitely tabled. Recognizing this, when we face the question of engaging in a struggle for a reform, revolutionaries need to focus on organizing tasks that can make strikes and other militant actions more possible. This can include— but is certainly not limited to— building a network on militants within workplaces and communities capable of creating support infrastructure that can fight attempts to wait out strikes, building connections between the community and workplaces to bring the widest range of people into solidarity and limit attempts to drive wedges between sections of the working class.
What sections of the class is engaging in the struggle?
A large component of the politics of contemporary advocates of non-reformist reforms is the idea of universal reforms. Universal reforms are universal because they affect the entirety of the class. These reforms are contrasted with particularist reforms which have a much more limited range of the class that it affects. An example of a universal reform that is frequently given is Medicare for All and an example of a particularist reform would be police or prison abolition. In his response to Jacobin writer and Philadelphia DSA member Melissa Naschek’s review of his book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, political theorist and editor of Viewpoint Magazine Asad Haider points out the flaws of this view.
“On the other hand, movements against any form of domination and exploitation are not automatically universal. Economic demands are not inherently any more universal than other kinds of demands; even an expansive economic demand like universal healthcare in the United States, however valuable such a reform would be, does not even begin to address capitalist exploitation on a global scale. To argue for improvements in the living conditions of Americans alone is not universal. But any struggle can become universal if it challenges the whole structure of domination and brings about a collective subject with the possibility of self-governance. What counts is how this struggle is conducted, who it resonates with, and what organizational processes it initiates or augments. All struggles emerge from specific sites and have specific demands. But they generate universal principles: that nobody should be a slave; that nobody should be exploited; that nobody should be subjected to state violence. What these principles allude to is a collectivity of people who aim to govern their own lives.”
Not only does the framework of universal reforms get the question of universalism wrong, it also glosses over a very important question. Who is the struggle for the reform engaging or mobilizing? While it might seem like it would follow that universal reforms will mobilize a broad cross-section of the class on the basis of the universal nature of the reform, this is not necessarily the case. The question is more tied to how the struggle for the reform is carried out. On a very basic level, if the struggle is being carried out through standard electoralist means— by running candidates, through canvassing in order to get people to vote in a certain way or calling elected officials— it will only engage the section of the population that votes. This population is often more well-off, older, and whiter than the working class., In fact, most of the working class does not vote. While these methods can be tied to a “get out the vote” strategy, any strategy designed around this is still going to have to base itself in the section of the population that can be relied on to vote.
This becomes a problem when you are dealing with reforms like Medicare for All. The section of the population most affected by the deficient US healthcare system are poor and working-class people, people of color (especially women of color), disabled people, trans people, and people with any of these intersecting structures. These groups do not make-up the sections of society targeted through methods engaging people as voters or potential voters. In fact, with many laws restricting votes via voter ID laws or laws prevent formerly incarcerated people from voting, and people from the aforementioned groups are often explicitly ejected from the pool of potential voters. However, one of the main ways in which advocates of Medicare for All are being told to struggle for the reform is through canvassing so these problems have already surfaced.
When the most oppressed are deprioritized, the potential effectiveness of the reform is undermined. If people of color, people with disabilities, trans people and others are not given priority within movements for demands like universal quality health care, the problems that they face that reproduce the structures of oppression affecting them are less likely to be addressed. The treatment they receive when accessing medical care is not something that is solved by making medical care universally accessible. The problems are much deeper. Healthcare must be transformed and it cannot be transformed by solely mobilizing the most privileged sections of the working class or the liberal sections of other classes. This argument is not just applicable to health care struggles. When we engage in struggles for reforms, we have to make sure that we are mobilizing and bringing front and center the most oppressed sections of the working class.
What organizational forms is the struggle creating?
Throughout the course of any struggle, new organizations are created. In some cases, these can be ephemeral such as a strike committee or picket teams. In others, they can be lasting institutions like unions, shop floor committees, or community organizations. For any socialist strategy to be successful, we need to form lasting democratic working class institutions. These institutions are needed in order to organize militant struggles to win reforms. The expansion of militant democratic rank-and-file working-class organizations through struggles are necessary to guarantee that reforms that are won are not rolled back shortly after the initial victory as well as to push against attempts to introduce elements that would create organizational divisions, making future struggles more difficult.
Our orientation towards organizing and the creation of new organizations should not be looked at solely through the lens of efficacy. One can say that strikes are most effective in winning reforms and that democratic rank-and-file workers’ organizations are necessary for this. However, there is a danger present in this statement. We run the risk of looking at working-class activity and organizations from a purely instrumentalist view. We become only concerned with working-class action through its usefulness in advancing our goals. This is particularly clear in certain Democratic road strategies where unions and strikes are seen as big guns that the party brings out to combat capital strikes and other forms of resistance to the leftist government.
We do not just want to effectively win reforms— we want to transform society. This goal is what needs to be present in our minds as we approach the question of what organizational forms the struggle is creating. From an instrumentalist view, rank-and-file unions could be necessary to win Medicare for All, especially one closer to the ideal form of the legislation. However, even in its more ideal form, the resulting system will be, to some degree, bureaucratic and alienating for the patients and community it serves as is the case with the national healthcare systems in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Rank-and-file nurses’ unions might help fight against those worst aspects but this is not sufficient. If over the course of the struggle for Medicare for All, organizations that bring nurses and patients and the surrounding community together hold the potential for future organizations that could work to transform health care. The task of revolutionaries becomes building up and strengthening those organizations.
In this way, we begin to see the real connection between our practical everyday struggles and our revolutionary goals. Reform struggles become less about reforms that, if free of serious compromises, will destabilize capitalism but about the ability for the struggle to lay the organizational groundwork for the future transformation of society. This also frees us from the dilemma posed by advocates of the Democratic road as our strategy becomes less focused on the expansion of the state by way of social welfare or nationalization but instead on building the potential for transformation of those industries and sectors of society. This is especially valuable in the case of reforms like Medicare for All which do not seek nationalization of the healthcare industry nor is likely to produce such. Our orientations are not dependent on reforms and our vision of the transition to socialism does not depend on them being formally incorporated into the state.
This also allows us to pontificate working class self-rule. Through the course of struggle, workers’ organizations produce not just potential basis for transformation of the industries in question but also raise the question of working class self-rule. In fact, the question of working class self rule is at the heart of the question of transformation of those industries and society. It is not just simply a matter of creating better, less alienating institutions or building strong unions that can be better at checking the power of capital, but new institutions that create a new society.
Is this struggle putting pressure on fault lines in the State?
For socialists who seek to smash the state, reforms present a real danger. Rather than providing more space and freedom for the working class and left, reforms can in turn strengthen the state and lead to a weakening of the left. Reforms can provide the state with new means to control working class activity. In Poor People’s Movement: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, authors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward highlight how this dynamic ended up working between unemployed councils and relief reform during the Great Depression:
“While the leaders of the unemployed groups had been concentrating on forming a national organization complete with a constitution and a bureaucratic structure, the local groups across the country were declining. They were declining largely as a result of the Roosevelt Administration’s more liberal relief machinery, which diverted local groups from disruptive tactics and absorbed local leaders in bureaucratic roles. And once the movement weakened, and the instability of which it was one expression subsided, relief was cut back. That this happened speaks mainly to the resiliency of the American political system. That it happened so quickly, however, and at so cheap a price, speaks to the role played by leaders of the unemployed themselves. For by seeking to achieve more substantial reform through organization and electoral pressure, they forfeited local disruptions and became, however inadvertently, collaborators in the process that emasculated the movement.”
“In some places, relief administrators went so far as to induct leaders of the unemployed into the relief bureaucracy on the grounds that “a Organized client groups meet a need,” and that “some process should be developed to make group ‘vocalization’ possible. Fair hearings and similar procedures in client group representation at advisory committee meetings should prove to be effective in relation to special situations” (quoted in Seymour, December 1937, 20).”
Similarly, reforms which can provide legal protections for worker organizing can be a double-edged sword. The Wagner Act established such protections but in the process, established the National Labor Relations Board, heavily regulating the existence and formation of unions and enshrining business unionism. If our goal is to build working class power, then we must keep in mind our relationship with the capitalist state. It is not enough to win reforms, but socialist activity has to be disruptive to the state or at the very least, we must not strengthen it.
Fortunately, the state is not a monolithic body. Within it are different fractions of the ruling class with different goals and political visions. These different fractions can produce fault lines that make it difficult for the state to function properly. A clear example of this recently is the government shutdown of 2018-2019. These tensions shouldn’t be seen as abstracted away from class struggle. Class struggle produces and puts added pressure on these fault lines. The 2011 protests against anti-union and austerity measures in Wisconsin provides a clear case of class struggles producing and heightening. The large protests by state employees under attack eventually lead to fourteen members of the State Senate fleeing the state in order to prevent quorum. As the protests grew, employees of the fire department, one of the sections of government employees not affected by the legislation, joined the protests. While eventually the state senators returned and the movement stalled after a failed recall attempt, it shows the potential for working class struggle to deepen conflict within the state. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) demonstrates this potential as well. In response to the wave of protests after the Eric Garner and Michael Brown murders at the hands of police, the New York Police Department went on a slow-down. While officially stated as safety measures as a result of the deaths of two police officers in a shooting, the slow-down was a clear counter-protest against M4BL and the weak reforms NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio sought to enact. For a brief moment, M4BL helped weaken the functioning of the particularly brutal, repressive institutions of the state.
While all of these moments were short-lived, they show what is possible. If we seek to smash the state, then we must keep in mind the ways we can put pressure on the fault lines of the state. Reforms can strengthen the state and, in the long run, weaken class struggle. If with each struggle we put increasing stress on the state, increase the degree of internal conflict, and weaken its ability to respond in a united fashion, we can limit the possibility of this happening. This also means we must keep in mind how the state might try to regroup and reassert itself. Keeping these dynamics in mind not only can help us in the long run but brings the question of smashing the state from being a hypothetical for a future movement, making it relevant strategic question in struggles right now.
Looking Forward
Not every reform struggle will provide satisfactory answers for each question. How they stack up depends a lot on the balance of forces of the moment and our capacities. Nevertheless, what it allows us is the opportunity to evaluate our practices and past engagements to map out new strategies and tactics as the terrain of class struggle changes. We can think about our engagement with reforms in a strategic manner like how advocates of non-reformist reforms try to do without falling into a rigid visions of unbroken chains of reforms or instrumentalist vision of class struggle. It provides us with road signs to help us navigate reform struggles and lets us avoid pitfalls of producing overly rigid models for revolutionary practice.
To return to Horras, we should not make reforms to be something they are not. While reforms might not have any inherent non-reformist content of their own, the struggle for them however can. It is our task as revolutionaries that we connect those struggles to revolution.
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19. “Voting in America: A Look at the 2016 Presidential … – Census Bureau.” 10 May. 2017, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2017/05/voting_in_america.html. Accessed 23 Mar. 2019.
20. “Who Makes Up The Working Class, in 3 Graphs – CityLab.” 11 Dec. 2017, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/12/who-is-working-class-in-3-infographics/547559/. Accessed 23 Mar. 2019.
21. “DSA Disability Working Group on Twitter: “But on the other hand, M4A ….” https://twitter.com/DSADisability/status/995035816014630912. Accessed 18 Apr. 2019.
22. “Poor people Movements” – Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward chapter 2 pg 76
23. ibid. pg 79-80
24. “Wisconsin Democrats Flee State To Prevent Vote On Union Bill : NPR.” 17 Feb. 2011, https://www.npr.org/2011/02/17/133847336/wis-democratic-lawmakers-flee-to-prevent-vote. Accessed 23 Mar. 2019.
25. “Wisconsin Firefighters Join Protest With Sleep-In | HuffPost.” 22 Feb. 2011, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/talya-minsberg/post_1761_b_826509.html. Accessed 23 Mar. 2019.
26. “Arrests plummet 66% with NYPD in virtual work stoppage.” 29 Dec. 2014, https://nypost.com/2014/12/29/arrests-plummet-following-execution-of-two-cops/. Accessed 23 Mar. 2019.