Reform

In Western societies, political reform comprises attempts to expand the reach of politics. Social and economic progress is said to depend on the repoliticization (reform) of productive and distributive outcomes, which, since the Enlightenment, have been subject mainly to individual, entrepreneurial, and market-driven decision-making criteria. Consequently, reform is an assertion of the efficacy of collective, deliberative, and democratic efforts to ameliorate, transform, or disrupt the processes and the tendencies implied by an unregulated capitalist “mode of accumulation.” The possibilities of reform presuppose that political development and political capacities are not as “structurally” constrained by economic conditions as radicals and political pessimists have feared. Reform, therefore, elevates political will, Machiavellianism, and sedulous institution building to an importance admitted by neither its liberal nor radical opponents. Its claim is that political arrangements can be constructed to reassert some of the political [Page 629]autonomy lost in the social experiments of economic-liberal rationalism.

The many rationales for political reform produced by social science, particularly antiliberal political economy, all imply that the scope for politics increases as economic development releases us from the realm of necessity. Wealth and democracy are seen as mutually reinforcing. Unregulated capitalist economies are seen as flawed by their chronic propensity to underuse important resources (most significantly, labour) and thereby to produce lower standards of living than are technically possible. In other words, reformists assume there are nonvolitional conditions tending to enhance the impact of distinctively political (and collectively mandated) decisions and correspondingly to diminish the province of unregulated (or privately initiated) activity, while facilitating economic prosperity. This presumption seems warranted, since the proportion of total income appropriated and spent by governments has increased from about 10 percent to about 40 percent over the past century. More significant than the empirical reality is the question why.

Arguments for an expanded role for political activism predate capitalist modernism and the classical era. Systematic and principled state support for industry development characterized the mercantilist era and the city-states of the fifteenth century when synergies flowing from advances in science, knowledge, and technological advance were first recognized. “Renaissance” or neomercantilist economic doctrines today continue to insist that free-trade ideologies emerged not as the justification or blueprint for development but as a way of frustrating the leading industrialized countries' challengers. (Britain, whose early productive supremacy was based on the strength of its navy and its access to cheap raw materials from abroad, was particularly anxious to keep continental economies undeveloped.) In the nineteenth century, Friedrich List in Germany popularized the idea of industry protection (learned from the Americans under Alexander Hamilton) and initiated an antiliberal strand of developmental doctrine that claimed that free trade would impoverish those nations at lower levels of affluence that engaged with it. Commensurately, much contemporary “reformism” has taken the form of attempts to construct state institutions to foster national development in a still-developing economic environment where affluence is nonetheless not guaranteed by its capitalist qualities alone.

A generation later, the mature political economy of Karl Marx's Capital unwittingly contributed to reformists' efforts by demonstrating that the underlying social relations of capitalism (private property relations, market mechanisms of allocation, profitability criteria, commodity production, the commodification of labour, and undemocratic control of production) would not always remain the best underwriters of wealth creation. Political interventions of various sorts could be expected to emerge as antiliberal forces sought to impose their preferences on what would otherwise be autonomous processes of capital accumulation or as business itself sought state assistance (for example, to regularize conflicts or markets or intersectoral problems). Conventionally, only the first of these forms of interventions have been referred to as “reform.” Perhaps surprisingly, Marxism has usually been loath to champion the reforms its analysis has prefigured.

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