I have on various occasions lauded the merits of what I call ‘permanent reform’, the idea being that pushing relentlessly for a mix of ‘attainable’ and ‘aspirational’ reforms might well be the optimum route to an extra-parliamentary collective mobilisation for social change of a more durable and transformatory kind. This idea is contained in my latest paper which is referenced at the end.
Reading China Mieville’s reflections on the Communist Manifesto, I came across a reference to what looks like a passingly similar strategy advocated by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto. They list ten measures of special relevance to the most economically advanced societies at the time of writing. These are, verbatim from Mieville (pp.58-59):
- Abolition of private ownership of land, and land rent applied to public works. (The authors later allowed that they would exempt ownership of a small amount of land.)
- High progressive income tax.
- Abolition of inheritance.
- Expropriation of ‘emigrants and rebels’, those who would leave to avoid workers’ power.
- The abolition of private banks for a single state bank in charge of credit.
- Centralisation of transport in state hands (to which, after the invention of early telephony, the authors added communication).
- The increase in the industrial holdings of the state, and the improvement of the natural environment, degraded by capitalism.
- The necessity for all to work if they can, and a programme of public employment.
- ‘(G)radual abolition of the distinction between town and country’: the synergising of agriculture and manufacturing.
- Free public education and abolition of child labour.
Mieville writes: ‘some of these now read as remarkably mild: proposals 2 and 10, for example, hardly necessitate the overturning of capitalism. Others, by contrast, such as 3 and 4, even if in the abstract compatible with capitalism in some form, seem highly unlikely ever to be permitted by actually existing capitalists. The important fact is that, far from being descriptions of communism, none of these particular measures were shibboleths even as stepping stones, to be insisted on in all circumstances; different contexts might suggest different demands … All these demands, however, particularly in combination, were intended to undermine the logic of capitalist society ‘itself’, even though, and in the context of being, still constrained and strained by it.’
Allowing for all the qualifications that might be made for time, place, context and policy, Marx and Engels’ list reads intriguingly like one I might construct under the rubric of permanent reform; that is, a mix of the attainable and aspirational geared specifically to the rapacious rentier phase of capitalism prevailing in contemporary UK. I find this most interesting!
My paper on ‘Campaigning for a Fairer Society’ is open access and can be found at:
Front.Sociol.,04 February 2022
https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.789906