reformism

Eleanor Robertson on the need for a communist, as opposed to liberal or reformist, approach to fighting oppression. This post first appeared on Medium.

The text of a 2017 presentation examining the significance of the “third sector” or “social economy”, the non-profit community development and assistance sector, its origins as a replacement for faltering government aid programs for excluded sectors of the population, its diversification and increasing economic impact on job creation, service provision and housing, its association with the “civil society” movement, its avoidance of conflict with state and private power and its reliance on parliamentary procedures and negotiations, its ideological smokescreens, and the rise of the “new commons” ideology as a delusional strategy for non-confrontational withdrawal from the system.

A December 2017 post-mortem on the Catalonian independence movement, its origins in the ruling classes of Catalonia, its social base among the middle classes, its goals, its tactical mistakes, its manipulation of the mass psychology of political and media catharsis, and most importantly, its tragic attraction for the pathetic remnants of the anarchist movement of the region, who flocked to the movement with the intention of furthering their identity and social issues, but only demonstrated their bankruptcy and decomposition with respect to their forebears who knew that nationalism was an enemy and fought it tooth and nail.

Here is a sarcastic piece from Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought paper in 1922, it was reprinted as follows in 1961 by the UK-based libertarian socialist group Solidarity in their Solidarity for Workers’ Power journal (vol.1, no. 8).