Reform or Revolution, rough

The question that often seems to determine where leftists orient themselves in the world of politics is that of reform or revolution. The question more specifically is this: is it possible to make incremental improvements to society without changing its basic mechanisms, and still achieve the vision of a free and classless world? Or is it necessary to cast aside the entire edifice of society, private property, law as we know it, commerce as we know it, and create something entirely new?

The basic problem with reform is that certain properties change for the system of society as a whole, but the basic institutional framework does not change. The anarchist would say that so long as a the structures of power maintain their form, oppression will repeat itself no matter what. Bakunin famously predicted that under state communism, the people would still be beaten down as ferociously as under the czar or worse- only it would be by the "people's" stick.

Closer to home, many have pointed out that we're fighting a rearguard battle when we try and regulate the corruption of big business, and reveal its collusion with government for the benefit of the few over the many. This is only a distraction, because as long as the corporate form exists as it does today, all these reforms will be outweighed by the overwhelming financial and political power of the owning classes. We must abandon the corporate form altogether, or radically transform it.

Many anarchists are far stronger in their criticism than this. They point to rather embarassing history of civilization itself, and note the absence of any real viable democracy in which class society in some form exists, or even when any centralization of economic and cultural power whatsover exists. We can start with Enron and keep swinging back the clock to the early nation states back to Rome and Babylon, and the same basic patterns repeat. As long as there is concentration of wealth and power, and s long as society is organized to support this concentration, we will see corruption, we will find abuse and exploitation rampant. This isn't a mere technical problem or a momentary lapse of integrity. The problems stem from a basic logic of domination and control at the heart of our society, an ascendence of will over and against empathy. So long as this remains, our every liberation will b turned against us and every new freedom will carry with it the same cages, even if the bars be shaped differently.

So this leads us to espouse a revolution, a total rejection of what is and creation of something new. Yet revolutions are strange affairs, and surprisingly few of them ever seem to have "worked" in any sense of the term. I think the problem of revolutions might be equally fundamental as the problems of reforms. When you cast off the mechanisms that govern a society, you have no real way of guaranteeing which mechanisms will replace them, and generally they seem to fall back to the most immediate, unreflective level of power. Instead of revolution, we lose the developed socia structures of class and caste and fall instead into simple association bound by ethnicity or tribe, identification based on the body, and the ordering principle of direct violence.

I was reading about the Guild Socialists earlier this week. They were a remarkable political group in England that flourished briefly in the first half of the century. They wanted society devolved to be run by congresses of guildsmen and consumers, locally based and democratic. Yet even this intelligent and broadly thinking group recommended a militia governed by the the society's political organ as a whole. I was shocked- after pages and pages of discussion of coordination between decentralized craftsmen and consumer associations, they still decided to call for a martial force controlled by a centralized political power.

Political violence stands as a sort of black hole, denying constructive analysis. We condemn and critique the violence of nations often enough, but I think we still preserve a lingering idea of some sort of truth to be found in political force. Ths makes sense really. If we are to destroy the received institutions and mechanisms for the distribution of social power, how are we to establish the legitimacy of whatever is to replace them? Since the dawn of history, violence has established and maintained almost every political system that exists. How are we to break with this and still transform society?

I am no idealistic pacifist. I don't abandon the idea of force entirely, a priori. I don't necessarily condemn groups that use it. Yet we must realize that to deploy it means to suspend all other mechanisms for governing a society, all those reasons we demand change in the first place. ...