Abstract

The age of reforms would appear to have taken over from the age of revolutions. However such a diagnosis of the present occludes the inversion of the progressive meaning of the term reform that has occurred. So-called “structural reforms” currently being imposed on societies are in fact reactionary counter-reforms, which go back on the revolutionary gains of two centuries of political and social reforms. After an examination of the current vein of reactionary neo-reformism, which draws on the Gramscian analysis of Italian fascism as a restoration-revolution, the article goes on to refute the claims of the neo-reformist project. It does so by way of a change in the paradigm at the heart of the project of revolutionary emancipation. The intention is to deconstruct the dichotomy between revolution and reform that was constructed by anti-revolutionary reformism in reaction to the French revolution, a dichotomy subsequently (and wrongly) taken up by a revolutionary anti-reformism. The intention is thus to defend the option of a revolutionary reformism which emerges from within the revolutionary movement.