Re: [Marxism] Duncan Hallas on the "reformists"

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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As someone who was driven out of the ISO because of a tendency to reformism, I 
am inclined to think that this is a very important topic, Lou.  It is also 
coming to the head now with the almost sure and certain resurrection of the 
British Labour Party under Corbyn.

In a talk that I gave to the DSP before the British Election, I argued that if 
we were all in the UK then we would all be or all should be inside Momentum,  
but not as entryists.

I was asked how should we should then be inside the Labour Party, the party of 
reformism.

I don’t think I answered that question very well.  But I do have a horror on 
entryism as a force to split and wreck and I am obsessed with a certainty that 
no good comes from that tactic.

I think I compounded my poor handling of the question of reformism versus 
entryism by forecasting that Corbyn would do very badly in the UK elections and 
that in all likelihood the forces he represented would be smashed.

DUH!

In my defence this talk was before the release of the Labour Party manifesto.

Comradely

Gary




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[Marxism] Duncan Hallas on the "reformists"

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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One of the things that characterizes the SWP in England is its liberal 
(in the sense of profligate) use of this term. There are the 
"revolutionaries" in the SWP and just about every other group is 
"reformist" such as Syriza, Podemos, et al. The problem is that this can 
apply not only to the leadership such as Tsipras but also to the 
rank-and-file that might fail the "state capitalist" theory litmus test. 
Here is Duncan Hallas describing the rank-and-file of the British Labour 
Party in the 1930s:


	The Labour Party did, of course, contain “masses of politically 
conscious workers”. Individual membership grew from 297,000 in 1931 to 
447,000 in 1937 and it was considerably more proletarian in composition 
than it is today. But these workers, including that smallish proportion 
of them who actually attended their Labour Party organisations, were 
reformists. Their thinking and expectations were far, far away from 
those of the little band of Trotskyist entrists and the magic of 
“Transitional Demands” could not begin to bridge the gap.


The workers in the Labour Party were "reformist"? Including the coal 
miners and the steelworkers and the shipyard workers and the railway 
workers? Really? If that is to be taken seriously, it would mean that 
what was inside someone's brain was more important than their class 
composition.



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