Ask Lemmygrad

This is an age-old debate (see Luxembourg's "reform or revolution").

The Marxist-Leninist line holds that protecting or enhancing the material conditions of the proletariat before the revolution can both increase the number of prospective party-members or militants (i.e. you can't organise rallies if you're starving) and gain the confidence of the working class by representing their immediate interests (i.e. protecting workers rights) unlike bourgeois parties.

Smaller more tangible reform fights are also ripe ground for recruitment of militants, as inexperienced comrades can get a lot of first hand experience organising for, for example, solutions for food security (Black Panther Party's free breakfasts).

However those reforms are means to an end, and that end is revolution. So reforms should not be a one-and-done thing (see the UK's NHS) but rather a front in heightening class war and highlighting capital as the enemy and their resistance to reform as evidence. I once saw a comment in another Lemmy instance that said something like "we tried to implement public healthcare, but capital resisted too hard so there's no hope". That is due to social-democrat and reformist monopoly over the discourse about public healthcare, which needs to be challenged by communists.

The term "class war" is not hyperbole. In a war, you should settle only for defeating your opponent, hopefully forcing them to capitulate or maybe even eradicating them. You don't take your single victory in a battlefield and pack your bags to go home, that's the reformist line represented by Jeremy Corbyn and in a more aesthetic sense, Bernie Sanders. But you also don't wait while your enemy marches into your territory hoping that their cruelty will materialise an uprising to defeat your opponent in a single blow, that is the spontaneists line held by every other Trotskyist splinter party or academicist communists.