File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-04-05.230, message 74


Subject: Re: M-I: Lenin on reforms and revolution
From: jschulman-AT-juno.com (Jason A Schulman)
Date: Sat, 05 Apr 1997 13:36:45 EST


"Unlike the anarchists, the Marxists recognize struggle for reforms,
i.e., for measures that improve the conditions of working people without
destroying the power of the ruling class.  At the same time, however, the
Marxists wage a most resolute struggle against the reformists, who,
directly or indirectly, restrict the aims and activities of the working
class to the winning of reforms.  Reformism is bourgeois deception of the
workers, who, despite individual improvements, will always remain
wage-slaves, as long as there is the domination of capital.

"The liberal bourgeoisie grant reforms with one hand, and with the other
always take them back, reduce them to nought, use them to enslave the
workers, to divide them into separate groups and perpetutate
wage-slavery.  For that reason reformism, even when quite sincere,
becomes a weapon by means of which the bourgeoisie corrupt and weaken the
workers.  The experience of all countries shows that the workers who put
their trust in the reformists are always fooled.

"And conversely, workers who have assimilated Marx's theory, i.e.,
realied the inevitability of wage-slavery so long as capitalist rule
remains, will not be fooled by any bourgeois reforms.  Understanding that
where capitalism continues to exist reforms cannot either be enuring or
far-reaching, the workers fight for better conditions and use then to
intensify the fight against wage-slavery.  The reformists try to divide
and decieve the workers, to divert them from the class struggle by petty
concessions.  But the workers, having seen through the falsity of
reformism, utilise reforms to develop and broaden their class struggle."

Lenin, "Marxism and Reformism," Collected Works, Vol. 19, p. 372.

-- Jason
______
"Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes
contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois
profundity."  Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), German critic, philosopher. 
Letter, 7 March 1931.



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