Towards a 'Revolutionary Reformist' Strategy: Within, Outside and Against the State

This article seeks to develop some broad principles and guidelines for a strategy of socialist transformation. The method adopted in this paper rests on the judgement that such principles may be extrapolated from an analysis and critique of the major failings of the two most established and historically influential socialist strategic approaches, namely reformism and Leninist revolutionary socialism. Accordingly the article begins, after a brief discussion of the necessity of renewed and reinvigorated strategic thinking on the radical left, by subjecting the reformist and Leninist strategies to critique. Some general guidelines in relation to the necessary shape of a more adequate strategic approach are elicited from this analysis. The article then moves on to outline the ideas of Boris Kagarlitsky in relation to socialist strategy as advanced in The Dialectic of Change. It is argued that Kagarlitsky's strategy accords closely with the guidelines developed earlier in the paper and that a slightly modified version of his approach provides us with a superior set of overall strategic principles to guide struggle for socialism. This strategic approach, which I term (following Kagarlitsky) 'revolutionary reformism', centres on the idea that revolution must emerge dialectically from a programme of radical reform, one set in motion by a socialist government working within the bourgeois state and operating in close partnership with a mass movement, well embedded in new institutions of popular, participatory democracy outside the state.