Notes

We begin today by prompting the age-old question that the left is perpetually asking itself. Reform or revolution? Reform has for a long time been the object of contempt for many radicals. Reform seems to be powerless. It’s resistance to capital swept away by an economy-held-hostage. If you enact a radical reform agenda, the economy tanks. SYRIZA’s victory in the 2015 Greek elections reinvigorated the hopes of the global Left, but as the Greek debt crisis ensued, the party was forced to enact austerity measures and kowtow to EU demands. Allende in Chile likewise was the victim of sanctions, coups, and economic catastrophe; Nixon and Kissinger once infamously said that they would make the “Chilean economy scream.” Since the 1990s, Sweden’s social democratic party has been steadily losing its electoral majority, now relying on a coalition with Neoliberal parties to maintain its increasingly precarious position, threatening Sweden’s vast social welfare infrastructure and pro-labor policies. And then sometimes reformists propose these visionary, radical policy agendas, but they seem as if they would require such a profound political change to be implemented that it’d be easier to just pull off a revolution

The alternative posed is revolution, but let’s be real. It seems impossible, antiquated. In the United States, we have hundreds of different communist parties declaring themselves the vanguard of the revolution. Revolution was a utopian dream that quickly became a totalitarian nightmare.

It seems like the left has no path forward. We are stuck between a powerless reformism and an impossible, potentially disastrous, revolution.

(octavio)