Reformism

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Reformism (also called revisionism or revisionist theory) is the belief that gradual changes in a society can ultimately change its fundamental structures. It is a key component of the movement known as democratic socialism. This movement is contrasted to revolutionary socialism which believes that there must be a revolution to fundamentally change a society.

"Revisionism" was defended by Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. Rosa Luxemburg was a prominent polemicist against reformism, with her essay Reform or Revolution?, written in 1900, where she assailed Bernstein's "Evolutionary Socialism". The Bolsheviks held a similar view, but Luxemburg died in the German Revolution while her counterparts won the Russian Civil War and founded the Soviet Union.

The term "Reformism" is usually applied to the political left. Reformists are seen as centre-left. Some social democratic parties such as the Canadian NDP are considered reformist.

[edit] Reformism in the United Kingdom's Labour Party

The term was applied to elements within the United Kingdom Labour Party in the 1950s and subsequently, on the party's right. Anthony Crosland wrote The Future of Socialism (1956) as a personal manifesto arguing for a reformulation of the term. For Crosland, the relevance of nationalization (or public ownership) for socialists was much reduced as a consequence of contemporary full employment, Keynsian management of the ecoonomy and reduced capitalist exploitation. In 1960, after the third successive defeat of his party in the 1959 General Election Hugh Gaitskell attempted to reformulate the original wording of Clause IV in the party's constitution, but proved unsuccessful.

Some of the younger followers of Gaitskell, principally Roy Jenkins, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams left the Labour Party in 1981 to found the Social Democratic Party, but the central objective of the Gaitskellites was eventually achieved by Tony Blair in his successful attempt to rewrite Clause IV in 1995.

The use of the term is distinguished from the gradualism associated with Fabianism (the ideology of the Fabian Society), which itself should not be seen as being in parallel with the revisionism associated Bernstein and the German SPD, as originally the Fabians had explicitly rejected Marxism.