Moribund Society and Anarchy · Chapter
XIX: Efficacy of Reforms explained
This chapter argues that reforms offered to workers under capitalism are either illusory or impossible to implement because the ruling class will always protect its privileges.
What happens
This chapter argues that reforms offered to workers under capitalism are either illusory or impossible to implement because the ruling class will always protect its privileges. It critiques specific reforms like income tax, reduced work hours, minimum wage, inheritance taxes, and cooperative societies, showing they fail to address the root cause of exploitation. The chapter concludes that only a revolutionary transformation can achieve true emancipation.
Themes in this chapter
Critique of Reformism
The chapter systematically dismantles the efficacy of reforms like income tax, reduced hours, and minimum wage, arguing they are either illusory or co-opted by the ruling class.
Critique of Private Property
The text argues that reforms cannot alter the fundamental division between exploiting and exploited classes, as property rights are defended by the state and bourgeoisie.
Social Revolution
The chapter concludes that only force and revolution can achieve real emancipation, rejecting gradualist or evolutionary approaches.
Characters to notice
- The Anarchists
The Anarchists are presented as the ones who decline to pursue reforms, recognizing them as decoys that distract from revolutionary change.
- Their Masters
Their Masters represent the exploiting class that lives at the expense of the workers and opposes any real reform.
- M. G. Ville
M. G. Ville is cited as an example of a reformer with a fixed idea—his system of chemical fertilizers—that would only work in a sanely constituted society, not under capitalism.
Key passages
“either the reform is illusory, a decoy used for the purpose of lulling the worker to sleep and making him exhaust his energies in the conquest of soap-bubbles which burst in his hands when he seeks to grasp them, or, if it really might alter the situation, the privileged class, which is in possession of the power, will put forth every effort to prevent its application or turn it to their own profit; hence we must always come to the same ultima ratio—force.”
Reforms are either deceptive tricks that waste workers' efforts or, if genuinely beneficial, will be blocked or twisted by the ruling class, so force is the only real solution.
This encapsulates the chapter's central argument against reformism.
“To regulate the relations of capital and labor in favor of the workers, to obtain an eight-hour day instead of one of twelve, seems at first sight a tremendous progress; and it is not surprising that many allow themselves to be caught by it, using all their energies to obtain this palliative, believing themselves to be thus working for the emancipation of the proletarian class.”
The eight-hour day appears to be a major advance, but it is actually a palliative that diverts workers from true emancipation.
This highlights the deceptive appeal of labor reforms.
“Of what moment to us, then, are these petty means for the enfranchisement of a few persons? For the rest, with the concentration of capital, the continuous development of machinery, ever demanding the putting of more and more enormous capital into operation, these same means of enfranchising small groups of persons break to pieces in their hands before they have produced any results.”
Small-scale cooperative or reformist efforts are insignificant because capitalism's concentration of capital and machinery makes them ineffective.
This dismisses piecemeal solutions in favor of total transformation.