Ask Lemmygrad

There's this implication that the same number of people required for reform are required for Revolution and that is not necessarily the case. Revolution can include a large majority of people, but if it did, it's more likely that a relatively peaceful revolution would be able to take place. Violent revolution is typically thrust upon people. Not everyone will want to or is equipped to be able to do a revolution. It's not like every American colonist was behind the American revolution. Many were loyalists, many fled, and many did fuck all and watched it happen around them. Some did a little, some did a lot.

All that really required is enough people organized to fight off the people who would fight to keep the current state alive.

Other comrades already gave pretty good answers, but I want to say that you're not taking propaganda into account.

From the day we are born to the day we die, we are bombarded with capitalistic propaganda about how it is the only viable system, how you can "win" too and how "awful and evil" communism and communist leaders are/were. We can't expect the general population to want anything other than reform when that is what is taught all the time as the only solution, and yet despite that, we only see things getting worse and worse.

Reform is not the solution because the whole system is made for the bourgeoisie. Reform is like trying to use a band-aid on an open wound, when in reality it needs proper treatment. If reform was capable of achieving socialism/communism, we wouldn't constantly see the erosion of rights and social nets everywhere. You can fight for a right for decades all to have it taken away the moment someone else comes to power. Not only that, but you also have the issue of lobbying. And like other comrades already mentioned, this is even worse in the global south, as every time a proper reformist or even socialist leader is elected, they get assassinated and/or the nation gets coup'd.

The unfortunate reality of the situation is that, even in the global north, the moment the people vote for anyone that threatens capital, the ruling class will not sit idly and hand over the keys to the working class, they will fight to keep their gripe. The only way they will give concessions willingly is when you have the threat of revolution at the horizon, and they only do that to appease the masses in an effort to destroy the possibility of the revolution happening. They give up their rings not to lose their fingers.

If you’re in the majority, you have the votes to be able to accomplish something with reform. It’s not like we live in a monarchy, reform is possible under our system.

The major flaw in your reasoning is that you have internalized that the state serves the people, without taking into account class. This was popularized by Kautskytes during the 2nd international, they pushed this notion that the state served as a reconciliatory apparatus among classes which you could theorically reform. Lenin on the other hand saw the state as an organized instrument of class repression, serving the ruling class, which in most of the world is the capitalists. This is further studied in Lenin's "State and revolution".

It’s not like we live in a monarchy, reform is possible under our system.

reforms have happened under monarchies. what you seem to be missing is that all states are class dictatorships. the state is the means by which one class opresses another. only the working class wants to abolish class entirely.

if you are making an appeal to democratic reform under capitalism, your "democracy" is a sham and here's why

Concessions are only granted when the capitalists feel threatened by a worker's movement, not when people vote hard enough.

Honestly I can't understand how anyone could look rolling back of civil rights in the usa, and the falling living standards across the western nations and think "all we need is a bit of reform."

Do you think that reforms of the past were not won by violence? For every MLK jr. there is a Malcolm X who gets erased from the official history books. For every peaceful civil rights march there is a Black Panther Party with guns guarding the protestors while they sleep. Suffragettes engaged in systematic property damage. Gandhi was a middle man between the british imperialists and the militant anti-colonialist movement in India.

In Guatemala, in the 40s and 50s, huge areas of land were owned by the United Fruit Company. They grew bananas there, to sell in the US. However, they didn't want to grow too many or else it would drive down prices, and they didn't want to let anyone else use the land or else they might compete with them, so they left huge areas of the land they owned fallow. This meant a lot of Guatemalans were left unemployed, because the land wasn't being worked, and there were also food shortages in Guatemala because so much land was either being used to grow cash crops for export or being left empty on purpose. So, United Fruit was able to pay low wages and have terrible working conditions and the workers would still be desperate to get a job from them. United Fruit, as such an important part of the Guatemalan economy, also had a longstanding back-room deal with the government to intentionally undervalue their land holdings, so they didn't have to pay so much land tax.

In 1950, the Guatemalan people elected Jacobo Árbenz, a social-democratic, moderate capitalist reformer. One of his first (and extremely popular) acts was a land reform bill, which forcibly purchased uncultivated land from various people and corporations, most notably United Fruit, with a kicker - the government only paid them the undervalued price they'd been using to avoid land tax!

In response, in 1954, the US government trained and armed five hundred right-wing Guatemalans, sent them into the country (while an aircraft carrier was parked offshore in case the Guatemalan military tried anything), deposed the government in a coup, and began a thirty-year reign of terror that resulted in tens of thousands of people being tortured, disappeared or murdered by roving death squads (armed and funded by the US and trained by Green Berets), especially against the native Maya populations of whom over a million became displaced refugees, while any left-wing guerilla groups in the countryside that tried to fight back were ruthlessly hunted with the full might of the US military-intelligence system.

There is no reform mild enough that it can be allowed to pass. Trying to solve the 'riddle' of capitalist democracy with a clever solution, like buying land for its undervalued price, doesn't work - the correct solution to the riddle is to choke on your cleverness and die. US support for this brutality was motivated entirely in defense of the profits of a private company, and spanned ten presidential terms of both Republicans and Democrats - do you think the people of the US could have elected anyone who would stop it? Do you think these tools of oppression wouldn't be turned inwards the very instant the US ruling class felt threatened? Do you think they haven't already?

While the coup was happening, a certain doctor from Argentina happened to be staying in Guatemala, and watched the violence and subsequent crackdown unfold. That doctor was Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, and he would go on to fight alongside Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution. They knew that reform wouldn't work, and that only a total overthrow of the system by violence, followed by the establishment of a new state that could protect itself from imperial aggression, would be enough to ensure peace and justice for the people. And now, despite decades of crushing sanctions and constant plots, sabotage, propaganda and assassination attempts, Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the United States. Its revolution succeeded where reform obviously could not.

How does Revolution work?

You kill some MFers and take over. Think we've seen plenty of revolutions throughout history.

You’re not allowed to vote any political system away in any nation, liberal allows you to choose between conservative liberalism or progressive liberalism, but you can’t vote liberalism away, you’re simply not allowed.

1. revolution is forced upon us because reform does not work or last
2. liberal democracy electoralism is not democracy for masses; it is a pressure valve for discontent to maintain the dictatorship of capital
3. when people allude to reform is working unfortunately it is at the expenses of the masses; in order to slow down the rate of profit reduction capital superexploits elsewhere and it is that surplus value that is used to subsidise welfare in ther west
4. and even that took a revolution. What we consider developed in the west universally occured after the USSR October Revolution of worker's - the birth of the workers state in 1917-1918. Westen workers then used the threat of that revolution to gain concessions for welfare - children labour laws, pensions, sick pay, women's rights, universal healthcare etc etc.
5. A certain faction of capital also saw the accelerated development of the USSR and understood to compete against this they need to invest in "human capital" to maintain longterm returns on profit
6. and all this began to be rolled back during Thatcher and Reagan with the fall of the USSR in the 1980s leading to present conditions

For further reading/listening:

• how the "developed" west was formed: https://redsails.org/concessions/
• reform vs revolution by economist Professor Richard Wolff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77BBlVjkLbI
• why marxism: https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

Aside from what other people said here, all of which I agree with, you also need to acknowledge the super-structural grip maintained on the working class. People are hard wired to maintain the status quo, even against their own interests. The point of a vanguard party is that you are organizing the most politically developed people to set an example of revolutionary praxis which breaks people out of their stupor, ignites class consciousness, and empowers them to go against the status quo for the first time. Revolutionaries are a marginal group of people, the tip of the spear, which paves a new way in real time that your average alienated worker will see and follow because finally, something that speaks to their needs is being done and they now know what they can do to help. They know rallying around another bourgeois politician is a waste of time, but by definition a revolution is something new, actual change.

The issue in the US and Europe is that most workers are labor aristocracy and truly want to maintain the status quo because a more equitable world means their quality of life will actually worsen. This is why fascism is able to cannibalize these nations, destroying them in the process, and opening up space for the nations they imperialized to gain more power and usher in better conditions for the undeveloped nations.

If you’re in the majority, you have the votes to be able to accomplish something with reform. It’s not like we live in a monarchy, reform is possible under our system.

In several countries we actually saw this happen: Sukarno in Indonesia, Allende in Chile, Lumumba in DRC, etc.

What happens is, under our system, the United States will come and fucking kill you for daring to attempt things like land reforms and then install a dictatorship to commit mass torture and murder and worse.

So maybe, after the hegemon collapses, it might actually be possible to reform our way to communism. Unfortunately under our system the empire exists and it is hungry.

Other commenter gave a good answer but I can provide some alternative answers and/or fill gaps. First, I recommend reading Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxembourg as this discussion has been had for over a century. The main issue is that you cannot reform into socialism, you can only reform to a point. There are people who's positions of power entirely depend on the domination of the working class, on their ownership of production. They won't give that up just because the workers vote for it, even if it is very popular. Why would they? They control the military, the food, the water, the electricity, our communication, even the information we receive. Reform can get you concessions, but it will never grant you freedom from the shackels of wage slavery because the capitalists depend on your servitude for their wealth and power.

As for how viable revolution is in the imperial core. It isn't. We don't stand a chance of revolting anytime soon as things stand. Its foolish of us to think the workers revolutions will begin here anyway. They will start in the periphery, especially Africa imo but also Latin America and Asia. Our goal here is to prepare a organization for when our revolutionary moment occurs, when the people have been made desperate by the loss of their portion of the imperial plunder. We should build trust by working closely with unions for workers rights, we should feed the homeless, provide financial assistance to the poor and fight for social equality so that people know who will actually assist them in a crisis. We should also prepare our organization to function as an interim government when the time comes.

There's only so many organizing hours in the day. When we spend them on reform, the opportunity cost is that we are not spending them building revolution.

There are precious few ways to have a revolution. But there are many ways to have reform.

That's the first problem - reform spreads the finite resources of organizing time over a much wider target area, which dissipates the energy.

The second problem is that reform doesn't actually work. All the energy being funneled into reform doesn't actually determine the reform - the power structure determines it. Revolution seeks to change the power structure. This would strip power from the people who currently have it. If you use reform to do that, it necessarily passes through the power structure and gets deformed.

Take for example universal healthcare in America. It is hugely popular. A super majority of the country supports it. There was enough organizing energy to elect a black president, but somehow, we got the ACA instead. Why? Because the people who have the power right now benefit from the current state of US healthcare and enacting universal healthcare would strip them of their power vis-a-vis healthcare. They hold the mechanisms of reform in their hands, so all the organizing time that went into universal healthcare reform got deformed into the ACA which further entrenched the existing power holders.

It's been almost 20 years and we're still trying to get that popular reform to happen.

Reform has never worked, because it explicitly relies on the power structure it is trying to change. The revolutionary analysis is that popular needs are not met and that reform will not meet them and historically this has always been true. Revolutionary analysis shows that it's not about popularity but about power and history has shown this to be true. Focusing our efforts on the root cause is how the change occurs. Spreading out our focus to all of the various symptoms is how change is thwarted.