Reform and Revolution: Three Early Socialists on the Way Ahead — William Morris, John Carruthers, Fred Henderson. Edited and Introduced by Stephen Coleman The William Morris Library #12. Thoemmes Press. 11 Great George Street Bristol BS1 5RR. U.K.
One hundred years ago a familiar dispute raged within the anti-capitalism movement Should we socialists organize our class to improve their lot under capitalism, or should we limit ourselves to educating workers about the need to abolish the system in its entirety? Today it’s very clear that the reformers have won for the time being. To everyone except small grouplets of libertarian non-market socialists—DeLeonists, world socialists, and anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists—socialism and communism mean social welfare programs and varying degrees of government ownership of the means of production, all within the market system.
The three anti-reformist pamphlets collected in this volume were written between 1887 and 1915 by William Moms and two other prominent British socialists whom he had influenced. Steve Coleman, who probably convinced the William Morris Society to commission the book, has written a thirty-eight page introduction that places that debate within the context of the events and preoccupations of the spokesmen and organizations of the time. Morris wrote "The Policy of Abstention” (20 pages, 1887) after his new group, the Socialist League, split from the Social Democratic Federation over the question of reformism. Carruthers’ “Socialism and Radicalism” (15 pages, 1894). written a few years later. describes the failure of the reformist-“radical" in his lexicon-politics of the Labor Party of New Zealand, where he lived for a time, to change substantially the lives of working people in that country when it held power. "The ABC of Socialism" by Fred Henderson (18 pages, 1915). was published by the Independent Labor Party, which supported Labor Party reformism but permitted dissenting views. It was published as part of a larger work presenting standard reformist ideas.
Coleman's introduction, after examining the historical context of the debate between the revolutionary anti-reformist impossibilists and the reformist gradualist possibilists in both England and abroad—including the US where the IWW and the SLP are mentioned—concentrates on Morris’s contribution to the book. His idea of abstention (boycotting elections) stems from the view that electoral activity by socialists must inevitably involve the advocacy of reforms to relieve the immediate misery working people suffer. Since Coleman belongs to that substantial part of the existing revolutionary movement that advocates electoral activity, he spends some time trying to explain and demolish Morris's contentions—and not too successfully as I see things now after decades in the electorally oriented SLP. But this aside, socialists will find the book useful both for its historical information on reformism and as a source for the never ending debates with the well meaning reformists we meet m our day-to-day discussions of social issues.
Frank Girard
Blogger's Note:
This book was also reviewed in the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard.
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