Marxism and Reformism

1 What were the Theoretical Roots of Reformism? The Tangled Web of ‘Catastrophism’1

The two terms that appear in the title of this chapter, Marxism and reformism, have the singular characteristic of having long lost their specificity in what they denote, and yet also of being used as almost universal categories, as if to desig- nate unambiguous contents whose meaning is generally taken for granted. And the qualities of reformism (reasonableness, pragmatism, gradualism), as coun- terposed to the corresponding lack of such qualities in Marxism (dogmatism, abstractness, revolutionism) are thus fixed in a spatial-temporal dimension in which they always appear the same. Generally, the journalistic-political field has been the privileged terrain for this semantic slippage. But given its weak scientific status, and the inevitable strains coming from themes still running very hot on the political terrain, a far from virtuous circle arises between these political expressions and the institutional spheres meant to be responsible for cool analysis. There are two particular elements that characterise the ways in which this circle tends to be activated: the embryonic-genetic approach, and the absolute counterposition of the terms in question.

1 The ‘catastrophism’ dealt with in this part of the chapter concerns the conceptual whole made to derive (or not) from Marx’s economic categories. As well as this way of considering catastrophism, a not-necessarily-connected and wholly political conception also had a wide circulation, in particular in the Giolittian era. In this latter case ‘catastrophism’ did not consist of the natural result of a process of ‘gradual immiseration’, but of the violent contractions of the passage from the old society to the new one, a passage that would not be without pain. A revolutionary socialist at the beginning of the century, later a revolutionary syndicalist, accused the reformists of ‘especially’ fighting ‘Marx’s theory of catastrophe, that is, the revolutionary conception of socialism’ but presented the ‘catastrophe’ as the final point of a long period of growth in proletarians’ living conditions. ‘For years and years we have expressed and repeated in all kinds of tones the idea that socialism must be expected to follow from living conditions superior to the current ones, to be created by the evolution of capitalism on the one hand and proletarian resistance on the other … The triumph of socialism is subordinate to the technical development of the instruments of labour and the economic and moral improvement of the proletariat’; Allevi 1901, pp. 29–30, 38–9.

The embryonic-genetic type vision presupposes the existence of an embryonic Marxism in which the signs of its future development were already present, and indeed dominant. Its whole experience can thus be seen both at the beginning – in the embryo in which the signs of the end are supposedly already evident – and in the results that ultimately make these same signs more intelli- gible. Like Macbeth’s witches, the upholders of the genetic approach think that they can ‘look into the seeds of time/And say which grain will grow and which will not’. However, the signs present in the first growth phases are very numerous. The different development of each of these signs is determined by a complex set of combinations, realised through the course of the general process of history. Each of these phases demands a specific analysis of its own, and, moreover, the phases that come afterward in chronological terms should not necessarily be considered the development of those that went before. If, instead, looking at Marxism’s relations with reformism, we privilege a reading in which the end is already inscribed in the beginning, yet the old signs of a gradual necrosis are only clear from the end, it would be natural to privilege the periods in which these characteristics tended to be more extreme, and thus simplified. Hence we will get a proof that ‘Marxism’ and ‘reformism’ are, and always have been, opposed and irreconcilable. In truth, this latter consideration seems to find greater support in works of philosophy and political science, seeing that in general it is expressed through the use of a modelling system characterised by the ‘paradigm’. However, certain historiographical efforts to revisit the question have also been influenced by this consideration. This interpretative slant partly found justification in Marxist literature’s propensity – and not only at the turn of the twentieth century – to propose a link between the theorisation of capitalism and prediction of the future. We can see large traces of this – even if the question is turned on its head – in today’s debate on the ‘death of Marxism’. This attitude certainly is rooted in the ground prepared by Marx himself, given that he considered it a scientific task to delineate processes that could – and must – become a point of reference for socialism and the workers’ movement. Here, we are certainly not talking about Capital’s analytical core itself. But given the complex combination of science, political passion, ethical tension2 and, as has been said, also of ‘cynicism’,‘utopi-

2 Croce’s observation in this regard seems very much relevant still today: ‘do we want to completely ignore the part that moral idealism played in Marx and Engels’s thought, in homage to their rejection of moral values? I think this is another case in which we have to distinguish between apparent thought and real thought’: Croce 1961, p. 172.