---
Title: Reformism
Description: An opportunist current that developed within the Second International, which held that through the struggle for lasting improvements and reforms -which were still possible- socialism could be achieved without going through a revolution.
Author: School of Marxism
URL: https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Reformism
---


> An opportunist current that developed within the Second International, which held that through the struggle for lasting improvements and reforms -which were still possible- socialism could be achieved without going through a revolution.

### Origin of reformism

The context of the Second International is still that of [rising capitalism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Rising%20capitalism). In that historical period it is possible to achieve lasting improvements and legal reforms that serve the affirmation of the class within a bourgeois society that can still give it a political space of its own. It is a period in which both [parliamentarism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Anti-parliamentarianism) and the [trade union](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Trade%20union) can be tools for the constitution of the class as a political subject, and in which the struggle for "reforms" such as the eight-hour day or universal suffrage...

> awakens understanding and socialist consciousness in the proletariat and helps it to organize as a class
>
> Rosa Luxemburg. [Reform or Revolution](https://www.marxists.org/espanol/luxem/01Reformaorevolucion_0.pdf), 1899

In such a context the parliamentary groups, and above all the trade union leaderships, will almost inevitably gain prestige and weight in the class, despite following increasingly [opportunist](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Opportunism) drifts. These drifts become more and more open as the monopolistic and totalitarian tendencies of the state take hold under [imperialism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Imperialism). The foundations are being laid for what will later be the [state capitalism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/State%20capitalism) characteristic of [decadence](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Decadence).

Reformism was in reality nothing but a symptom that the trade unions and the social democratic parties themselves were being absorbed into the new organization of national capital in the state. In its most *honest* form, reformism will acknowledge its break with Marxism and present itself openly as [revisionism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Revisionism), that is, as the result of the supposed overcoming of the contradictions of capitalism by capitalism itself.

### Does reformism exist today?

What is commonly called "reformism" today, the policies of the parliamentary left, has nothing to do with what the classics of the Second International called by that name:

- The reformism of the Second International was an [opportunist](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Opportunism) tendency within the workers' movement; the socialist parties, [the various descendants of Stalinism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Stalinism) or leftism of any color are the result of tendencies that crossed the most basic class boundary long ago, renouncing [internationalism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Internationalism) and taking part in the worst massacres of workers in history.
- That is, they are not expressions of errors or weaknesses in the development of [class consciousness](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Class%20consciousness), but political elaborations of structures well integrated into the political apparatus of [state capitalism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/State%20capitalism) in its various forms; in other words, they are designed to defend the national state and wage labor.
- Reformism was the product of an era in which "reforms" meant real and lasting advances for the class, among other things because these were possible; the "reforms" we are told about today do not mean "advances" towards the decommodification of capitalist society but, at best, "improvements" in its functioning that make it possible to avoid even more drastic worsening of the conditions of exploitation.
- And for the same reason, whereas reformism claimed to be able to reach [socialism](https://dictionary.marxismo.school/Socialism) through reforms, that is, claimed to be able to begin effectively decommodifying society, what is called reformism today sells us, at best, an impossible "sensitive", "compassionate" or "humane" capitalism, not reforms as a way of overcoming it.