WHAT ABOUT REFORM STRUGGLES?

 

 

People quite naturally and quite rightly wage all sorts of reform struggles all the time. Sometimes people try to stop the rulers from making things worse in some particular way. And sometimes people try to improve conditions of life for ordinary people in some way. When the explicitly stated aim of the struggle is something short of all-out egalitarian revolution then this is called a reform struggle.

 

PDR--Boston supports reform struggles. The WAY we support them is this. We strive to increase widespread public support for the struggle by not only communicating to the public the particular facts about the reform demand, but also the fundamental values and aspirations that motivate the people who are waging the struggle.

 

Invariably, when people wage a reform struggle, they do it because they want to make society at least a little bit closer to being an egalitarian society; they want to make it more equal (in the egalitarian sense of no rich and no poor), and they want to make it based more on people helping each other (mutual aid, solidarity) instead of being pitted against each other, and they want to make it more genuinely democratic instead of just a fake democracy as it is today. People waging reform struggles, in other words, have egalitarian  values and aspirations.

 

Egalitarian revolution means removing the rich from power so that people--the vast majority of whom want an egalitarian society--are able to shape ALL of society by their egalitarian values.

 

PDR--Boston wants people waging reform struggles to know something extremely important that is generally not known and even disputed. The fact is that their struggle would GAIN, not lose, support from the public if they told the public what truly motivated their struggle--that they want an egalitarian society with the rich removed from power and with real not fake democracy and with no rich and no poor.

 

Videos of "person on the street" interviews in Boston show (here and here and here and here) that practically everybody (no cherry-picking in the videos!) says they would support a progressive organization MORE if it sincerely said it wanted to remove the rich from power to have real not fake democracy with no rich and no poor.

 

PDR--Boston encourages people waging a reform struggle to tell the public explicitly about their egalitarian revolutionary values and aspirations. This will not only strengthen public support for the reform struggle, but will also strengthen the egalitarian revolutionary movement by giving people greater confidence that they are part of the majority (not a hopelessly weak minority) in wanting an egalitarian revolution. This is why we invite other reform-focused organizations to sign "This I Believe," as discussed here.

 

Reform struggles are not the opposite of egalitarian revolution or a substitute for it; they are a way that the egalitarian revolutionary movement gains strength and confidence from people learning  that they are part of a large majority in wanting to shape all of society by egalitarian values, and in wanting to remove the rich from power in order to be able to succeed in this great effort.

 

Most Marxists Disagree With PDR--Boston About Reform Struggles

 

Karl Marx, and the modern Marxists whose thinking is based on his writings, have, in contrast to PDR--Boston, a very negative view of ordinary (working class) people (as discussed here.) These Marxists do not agree that most people waging reform struggles have, themselves, egalitarian revolutionary values and aspirations. Marxists believe that people in reform struggles are motivated merely by self-interest and have no desire to create a classless society. Nor do these Marxists agree that people waging a reform struggle would gain, not lose, public support if they explicitly declared their egalitarian revolutionary values and aspirations (since the public likewise only cares about its self-interest.)

 

Marxists, therefore, view the motives of people in a reform struggle as being very different from their (the Marxists') motives as revolutionaries. Some Marxists see their role as persuading people in a reform struggle to change their goal (and their values) from a self-interest reform goal to the more nobler revolutionary goal. These Marxists look down on reform struggles as "not revolutionary" and they take some pride in not getting involved in such struggles.

 

Other Marxists join and even try to lead reform struggles. They do this while down playing their revolutionary aspirations. Their aim is to persuade the people in the reform struggle that they (the Marxists) are good leaders, so that the people in the reform struggle will follow the Marxists' revolutionary party in spite of the fact that they (supposedly) don't share its revolutionary goals. This way the revolutionary party will be able to seize power one day and then use that power (very un-democratically, of course) to re-mold ordinary people so they will stop just "thinking with their belly" and become (as Che Guevara put it) "Socialist Man."

 

The point is that neither of these ways of relating to reform struggles is useful. Marxists act as if people in reform struggles did not want an egalitarian revolution. The Marxists get all tangled up in debating amongst themselves how to relate to these "un-revolutionary" struggles. They miss the point entirely. Reform struggles are only "un-revolutionary" because the people waging them do not know that the majority of the public shares their egalitarian revolutionary aspirations. The role of a revolutionary is to help people (including those in reform struggles) learn that in having egalitarian revolutionary aspirations they are in the great majority. When this is well known, people waging reform struggles will declare their revolutionary aims and strengthen both the reform struggle AND the egalitarian revolutionary movement.