SUCCESSFUL PROGRESSIVE REFORM
An approach that a future government might take to deal with the current systemic problems is to actually implement some set of limited reforms that improve the lives of everyday people, defuses some of their ill will towards the current system, and helps reproduce a functional and productive society in the long run that can continue to be controlled and exploited. Such an attempt is most likely to be made by the Greens, a Labour party that has been captured by a resurgent left-wing faction, or some other left-wing party.
However, this is easier said than done. Under normal conditions, governments are more accountable to powerful businesses and their own internal technocratic bureaucracy than they are to everyday people, and both of these have interests that conflict with the needs and desires of everyday people. Capitalists are driven to make profit by competition in the market, and technocrats are driven to build power by competition within organisations. This often leads to exploitation and oppression of those at the bottom of society in order to create that profit and power, and often these drives end up being quite short-termist in how they manifest: when your social position is defined by profit and power, what is the point of trying to build a stable society tomorrow if it doing so comes at the cost of going bankrupt or being thrown out of power today? Because of this, most governments, regardless of ideology, end up protecting these short-term interests because they need the cooperation of capitalists and technocrats to function, even if this leads to social disintegration in the long term.
Therefore, there are two ways that a reformist government can get its reforms through:
- It can work out a set of reforms that are agreeable to enough of the capitalists and technocrats in society that they can pass them on those merits alone. Such reforms are often very limited and end up looking more like business as usual.
- If a force outside of capitalism and the state’s bureaucracy can create enough of a short-term threat to cause many capitalists and technocrats to fear that they might completely lose their positions of power and privilege, then more serious reforms can be pushed through to stabilise the system.
Such a threat can be external, such as a threat from another state or the immediate risk of a natural disaster, and cannot be controlled by any political party. Due to those pressures previously mentioned, for a party like the Greens or Labour to push through major reforms, they would need to be combined with a social movement outside of capitalism and the state which can apply enough pressure to make reform look like a better option than ignoring the social movement and risking a revolution. If we look at the golden age of social democracy in Europe, we see it came out of a combination of these threats: the fear of an external Soviet superpower and the fear of the kind of internal radical workers’ movements that had launched revolutions in several countries provided the motivation for many European states to build strong welfare states as a way of defusing internal tensions and guaranteeing the loyalty of their citizens.
For anarchists, successful reform offers a mixed bag of opportunities and challenges. The limited changes brought about by a competent government might start to restore the faith of many in the system in a way that undermines our ideas and desires for a better way of living. On the other hand, once people start to see that change is possible, it will become easier to argue that we can use that possibility to push for even more radical change. To face such a reforming government, we need a strategy that encourages people to look beyond immediate survival and make more ambitious demands that are not possible within the bounds of reform. It will be important to emphasise and argue for changes that undermine the very system of the state and capitalism itself and so cannot be implemented by any government. For example, the government may be able to accept better working conditions or a less brutal border regime as the price of social peace, but it can never accept full worker control of the means of production, or the abolition of the police and controlled borders.
FAILED PROGRESSIVE REFORM
While social movements can be a necessary tool for a far-sighted political elite to push through reforms that are needed for the long-term stability of the system, they are also potentially dangerous. These social movements have to be far enough outside the state’s and capitalism’s systems of power that they can threaten them, but also integrated enough that they can still be controlled and even disbanded when they have done what their leaders desire. This was the ultimate fate of the mainstream workers’ movement in much of Europe, which saw much of its bottom-up infrastructure outside of the state undermined and then destroyed when they became no longer useful to left-wing political parties.
However, the fact that such social movements need to be somewhat outside of the system of the state and capitalism and powerful enough to genuinely threaten it means that they have the capacity to break with any political party that is attempting to use them, and push for more radical reforms or even revolution. If a social movement develops a new elite with competing interests to the existing elite, as was the case with the Leninist and national liberation movements of the 20th century, or develops bottom-up structures that put the movement under the control of its members as a whole, then they can become a genuine threat to the current elite or, in the latter case, even to the system of state and capitalism itself. Successful progressive reforms can also create the space for this to happen by providing people with more time and resources, breaking them out of apathy and despair, and encouraging them to engage more with social movements and take more prominent roles in running them. One of the things that brought the golden age of social democracy to an end was an explosion of worker, countercultural and social justice movements that could not be contained within the acceptable bounds of reform, requiring the state and capitalism to pivot to the more oppressive strategy of neoliberalism that has led to our current conditions.
This future would provide the most obvious opportunities for anarchists, but it also represents a potential danger. On one hand, an uptick in social movements will provide spaces for anarchists to spread our politics, argue for bottom-up structures and encourage social movements to move in a more radical direction. On the other hand, facing a political party that is deliberately trying to leverage these social movements in order to push its own objectives will mean that there is the potential for anarchists to get involved in social movements that ultimately use us as useful idiots for their political masters. We will bring the skills to make the movement work, only to be marginalised and discarded when the movement has played its role, as has happened to us many times in the past. To avoid this latter result, we must not get involved in social movements in a thoughtless and haphazard way. We need to be ready to:
- Contest reformism within them.
- Persuade members to support methods of anarchism in practice.
- Spread anarchist thought.
- Leave those movements and start new ones if they end up as tools to reinforce authority.
Ideally, we start these social movements ourselves, and immunise their structures and ideas against reformism from the very start so that any attempt to co-opt such social movements for mere reformism will result in failure. However, attempting to proactively be the first movers in social movements will require an anarchism that is more confident, committed and coordinated.
The Eclipse 
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