For the reformist. power takes the form of political office gained through the acquiescence of a passive working class. Capitalism to him is not a system which must cither left or right according to the disposition of the government in office. overriding objective, therefore, is to control the levers of this machine.
chosen, they will, if it cannot be contained, try to destroy it.
revealed.
From the thundering of Ancurin B-an to the misleading mysticisms of Ramsay Two words characterise the differences between reform and revolution: power and be fought and overthrown, but a machine which can be manipulated at will to move His In this scheme of things, the working class has at best a subordinate part to play. It may vote, it may find the money, but it must not fight: for any real stroggle threatens the existence of the very machine which the "politicians" have set out to control. Confronted by a militancy which threatens their authority and the direction they have So long as social democracy is successful, this aspect of reformism remains hidden; at a time of crisis, however, on the scale of that in Britain today. it is starkly and brutally The right reformists, of which the Wilson government is the principal expression, seek to maintain discipline, to restore order to industriil relations. The left reformists. whn social domocrats have no intention of mobilising so uncontrollable a force.
whole of Western society indeed, are clear: revolution or repression.
capacities of the workers.
incorrect. It still has the power to confuse and obfuscate the issues of the day. perceive in this an attack upon the working class and the ultimate destruction of the party, are paralysed; they cannot support repression, yet neither can they fight it. For the only force capable of defeating the ruling class is the working class: and the left Their justification is that such a struggle would destroy the party, disrupt society, and unleash the forces of reaction. But this is to miss the point. The Labour Party has no future, and the disintegration of British society is beyond their or our control: a revolutionary struggle, though it may in the short ran encourage the forces of reaction, is in the long run the only way of defeating them. The alternatives for Britain, for the Left reformism is pernicious. It is both atopian and defeatist: utopian because it has a vision of the future in which class antagonism and exploitation will wither of their own accord; defeatist because when confronted with the forces of reaction, it cannot believe that the working class is capable of securing their defeat. In a phrase: it overestimates the potentialities of the capitalist system, and underestimates the It has become fashionable to decry the power of the non-revolutionary left; but this is