Reformism and Melancholia

This article seeks to addresses the persistence of reformism within contemporarysociological and social-theoreticalresponses to the crisis. It begins by considering the temporal meaning of crisis and , drawing on the work of Koselleckconnects it. It then links this temporalising framework to an appraisal of the extent to which the alternativeclassical debates about'reformism andor revolution'– with their conceptions of progress, urgency and gradual or catastrophic social transformation – still determineconditions our debatesthinking. The article goes on to consider two recent contributions (by Negri and Blackburn, in debate with Mann) whichradical arguments for the obsolescence of reform.,andIt suggests that acontemporary focus on the sociology of knowledge has impaired the discipline’s capacity to move beyond bothengage critically with the reformist imaginaries that circumscribe policy debate and public commentary.

Keywords

crisis, reformism, politicscapitalism, crisis, reformism

Crisis and the reformist hypothesis

'Today, anyone opening a newspaper often bumps up against the word “crisis”. It indicates insecurity, suffering and uncertainty, and alludes to an unknown future whose presuppositions cannot be clearly elucidated'. These lines are taken from a dictionary published in France in 1839. I want to approach the question of how we reckon with the global financial crisis of 2008 and after from a somewhatan admittedly oblique angle, that of crisis as a mode of historical and temporal experience, which is also to say a structure of feeling (Williams: 1977: 132). I will then sketch some of the ways in which this structure of feeling of 'reform' may become serve as a hindrance to our sociological imagination of crisis. I will as well as tothen survey some of the orientations towards and away from reformism present in contrasting theoretical diagnoses of the crisis emerging in Europe and North America. Though these might appear to be very speculative concerns, I think it is imperative to reflect on the social horizons of temporality that govern ourresponses to a situation in which the short term and the long run appear desperately entangled and confused.

I want to begin by turning to the conceptual history of the notion of crisis, which was elucidated with outstandingimposing erudition by Reinhart Koselleck. Koselleck’s work underscores the relationship between time and agency, which lends crisis both its importance for social theory and its often maddening ambiguity, as well as its easily inflated use (anything, at any time, can be said to be ‘in crisis’). Relying on its medical meaning, as derived from Hippocratic medicine, where it referred to the phase in a diseaseof an illnesswherewhen the patient will either succumb or recover (Koselleck 2006: 360), Koselleck defines crisis as ‘that point in time in which a decision is due but has not yet been rendered’. From a sociological angle, the idea of a ‘point’ in time is ambiguous, since social crisis rarely takes the form of an instant or an event (Gramsci 1971: 275-6). The time of crisis is a time that has not yet been taken on or assumed by an agent ora subject.I– it is a time of uncertain expectation. – Yet it does includeimply the idea of an eventual decision, and thus of an agent, within its concept. Crisis herecan be taken todenotesinvolvea temporal tensionan orientation from a finite and ambivalent period to a moment of decision; it is ‘a compulsion to judge and act under the pressure of time’ (2002: 244).

Koselleck presents us with three semantic models of crisis, all of them of theological derivation. The first is that of history as permanent crisis, a global process that is also a total judgment: ‘World history as the judgment of the world', writes Koselleck, 'implies foremost and above all the statement that every situation is marked by the same urgent sense of decision’ (242). The second model is of singular processes of acceleration and thresholds of change. Here crisis is ‘an iterative periodising concept’ allowing for comparison and analogy. This is the model that pertains to ordinary conceptions of economic crisis, though unlike a medical understanding of crisis, which is broadly homeopathic, capitalist crises are marked by the limitlessness of accumulation. The third model, that of a final crisis, is the most theologically laden. It is also haunts popular culture and the imaginaries of business elites (Ourousoff 2010: 117). Koselleck’s own response to the idea that we live in an epoch of potentially terminal crises is to resort to the Christian notion of a 'katechon’, of a force that may restrain the onset of collapse. Note that Koselleck repeats a common observation about the ambivalence or polysemy of Marx’s concept of capitalist crisis – precariously, or dialectically, poised between the second and third model. As Koselleck notes, in a debatable but suggestive formulation: ‘One the one hand, he operated with a concept of crisis immanent to the system while he expounded the iterative structure of economic crises. On the other side, he knew of a concept of crisis destroying the system which he derived from other premises, making it possible to see world history drifting toward a last great crisis’ (244).

This semantic modelling of crisis can orient a consideration of reformism’s present fortunes. Reformism, especially as it hovers uncertainly over our current policy debates, does not just represent a family of political positions, but a disposition towards social time and our capacity to shape it. This was acutely the case in the socialist debates that did most to shape the trajectory of reformism in the twentieth century, and continue to haunt our own. It is particularly relevant in regard to our purposes that the twentieth-century history of reformism is the child of the socialist debate over the political consequences to be drawnfromThe effort to solder together Marx's crisis theory and fromthe strategic questionchallenges facingof how worker's' parties gave rise to a vast set of political contrasts and theoretical arguments, all marked by the peculiarities of different political conjunctures. The contradictory experiences with social-democrats with political power in the interwar period were accompanied by intense debate around the possibility of a coherent Marxist reformism, based on appraisals of a mutation in the nature of the state – most prominently perhaps in Otto Bauer's theory of the state as a balance of class forces, and Rudolf Hilferding's account of organised capitalism (Thornhill 2000: 108-114).

The emblem of the Marxist quarrel on reformism and revolution is of course to be found in the debate that The century-old debate about reform and revolution took place on these grounds, pitteding Rosa Luxemburg against Eduard Bernstein. Koselleck can partially illuminate this contest, allowing us to see Luxemburg's interpretation of thisthe crisis – which in Koselleck's terms treated it as thea catalyst for an urgent alternative, – with Eduard and Bernstein's evolutionary view of reformism not as a katechon, holding back disaster, but as a gradual move towards a telos of social justice that the rush to revolution could only derail. ButWhile the question of reformism, or at least of a politics in and against a still-capitalist state, remains on the agenda – namely in the complex and ongoing trajectory of Latin America's 'pink tide' (Webber and Carr 2012) – the classical prospect of a teleological reformism, and the strategic council of caution and gradualism that accompanied it, has all but vanished from the world's political imaginary.

Luxemburg's rejection of the notion that capitalism could adapt its way out of crisis by means of credit, the unification of capitals, and the spread of communication – a socialist precursor of Ben Bernanke's ill-fated views about 'The Great Moderation' – seems rather apt in our age of debit cards and CDOs. But the less Whiggish idea of a reformist katechon taming capitalist barbarism, so widespread today, is not any more persuasive for that. It is not simply the case that the balance of social forces in the heartlands of capitalism speaks against it; it appears to rely on the prospect of something like a capitalism without capitalism: a durable manner neutralising its tendencies to crisis, and arresting its intensifying exploitation and devastation of labour and nature.

For some years now, advocacy of a pragmatic, sensible left has depended precisely on the prospect of a tamed, responsible capitalism. This is a perspective which we could note holds a special allure for sociology, to the extent that the discipline's spontaneous political philosophy – evident all the way from Durkheim's corporativist speculations to the palliative emphasis on 'social capital' – may be seen to involveregarded as oriented towards an 'embedding' of capitalism, and in particular of its tendencies to abstract and dissolve social bonds (Therborn 1976; Clarke 1988 and 1991; Fine 2001). To the extent that capitalist modernisation has been perceived as a deep and enduring epochal crisis of experience and value, sociology has often presented itself as a kind of intellectual department of crisis management or crisis prevention. If there is an elective affinity between sociology and reformism, then this moment of protracted 'crisis' (a period which is replete with decisions, yet all of which do nothing but reinforce the everyday perception that this is a malady without resolution),poses a particular problem, which we could call that of the melancholy of reform. The economic crisis has all-too-predictably morphed into an opportunity for the reiteration of the same dynamics that occasioned it in the first place (Mirowski 2013). Residual regions of non-commodified social life are again primed for dispossession. Even those policy moves that seem to transcend the neoliberal matrix – US health care 'reform' for instance – intensify the financialisation of everyday life (Gaffney 2014). In this context, the post-war Euro-Atlantic compact between big labour, big capital and big government (Harvey 1989: 142) has become an imaginary focal point for many of those still wedded to the notion of social justice.

In Europe, ever since what some see as the last, thwarted burst of genuine reformism, in the guise of the measures to socialise capital proposed by Rudolf Meidner in Sweden (Blackburn 2005), the notion of reform has been drained of import or irrevocably traduced.[1] With the mutation of social democracy into social liberalism, it has come to signify either the rollback of the postwar gains of labour (e.g. 'pension reform'), or the advocacy of initiatives to alleviate inequality without questioning accumulation. Though Keynesian reformism too didn't fundamentally intervene on the basic parameters of capital as a social relation, today's 'reformism' is immeasurably more cosmetic. Indeed, as we are reminded of on a daily basis, it can only present itself as a benevolent political manager of accumulation on the upswing of the business cycle, and descends into 'verbiage' (Miliband 1969: 242) as soon as it is faced with a crisis.

This reformism without reforms can be contrasted with the proliferation of prescriptions for reform shorn of reformism; radical measures that nevertheless do not herald a fundamental upheaval in the social structure, or belong to an overall strategy for transformation. These range from interventions into the superpower of transnational finance (the Tobin tax), to affirmative action against new forms of exploitation (the guaranteed basic income), from proposals for audits of odious debt and policies of sovereign default (in the cases of Ecuador and Greece) to the socialisation of pension funds. We can speak of reforms without reformism here in the sense that the connection between such measures and a broader horizon of emancipatory social change is often unclear. Both telos and strategy are in abeyance. Though it transcends the limits of this paper, this opacity is certainly present in the fortunes of Thomas Piketty's recent proposals for a planet-wide wealth tax, as a curb on the power of the 1%. Its admirable intention to propose radical and calibrated measures is accompanied not just by a stunning silence on the dynamics of crisis, but by extremely underdetermined references to democracy, transparency and social justice (Piketty 2014; Harvey 2014).

When not concerned with circulation or distribution alone, many current responses to the crisis, including on much of the left, appears to imagine that 'a society founded on work', to quote the Italian constitution, remains the irremovable horizon of our social and economic life. A Fordist nostalgia impedes the elaboration of forms of social antagonism relevant to a situation in which the relation between class and labour, the function of industry, the overall dynamic of accumulation and the international division of labour have mutated significantly from the postwar period – an age that was itself marked by many dimensions, even if we continue to limit ourselves to the Euro-Atlantic North, that are customarily overlooked in airbrushed visions of Fordism as a social paradigm: the gargantuan devaluation of capital through wartime destruction that made a US-led boom possible; military Keynesianism; the critical effects of Cold War political competition; the racial and gender limitations of the welfare compact; and so on.

Barriers to the sociological imagination

Sociologists and social theorists are bound to share much of the historical common sense of their epoch. Taking the intellectual challenge of the ongoing crisis seriously involves doing some violence to that common sense. Some very resilient habits of mind can serve as hindrances to our understanding. By way of conclusion, I want to briefly touch on two of these.

The first could be placed under the twofold rubric of periodisation and paradigm. Ever since Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War, thinking about epochs or processes as unitary natural kinds has been a critical dimension of reflection on society, which can never proceed with the blinkered empiricism that sees history as the train of one damn thing after another (Toscano 2010). The kind of periodising concepts that social thought has long traded in are indispensable for any kind of cognitive mapping of social relations at the analytical and prescriptive level. It is a featureAnd we can of course add that it is an effect of capital's logic that it can indeed be seen to throw up temporal phases as just such natural kinds – cycles of accumulation, Kondratieff waves, and so forth. However, there is a profound tendency to reify these orienting concepts, recurrently interfering with the sociological cognition of political economy. 'Fordism' is an important case in point. For all of its heuristic value it has also led to eliding the remarkable continuities in forms of capitalist discipline and exploitation, and to painting, in an intensely parochial way, a precarious and partial social compact in certain advanced liberal societies as a homogeneous reality. To characterise a period thusly, by formatting it in terms of a paradigm, also carries significant political effects – in this case, the oscillation between viewing those postwar decades as a kind of regulative ideal for a meliorist conception of social justice, and declaring that, as we are now in a 'new capitalism', all of our political practices must change (Doogan 2009). PA particularly curious, in this respect,matterhereis of course the way in which social theory tends to turn certain economic theories and categories into periods and paradigms. 'Keynesianism' – that exquisitely unstable congeriescomplex of theoretical innovations, policy proposals, state strategies, and so on – is accordingly often paired with 'Fordism' in misleading ways. Thus, for example, t This common-sensical coupling renders enigmatic, for instance, the intensification of deficit-priming of aggregate demand well into the supposed era of liberalism (just think of the Reagan deficit).becomes entirely enigmatic, and is therefore ignored, the moment tThe economy isbecomes a domain to be approached in terms of its forms of appearance, much less than in those of someneglecting resilient underlying patterns, leading sociology to echo the profoundly ideological re-brandings of capitalism – witness the many books on the new capitalism and the new economy which minimised, or entirely disavowed, capital's crisis-tendencies.

The I have already alluded to the second, and closely related, habit of mind that impairs sociological thinking on the crisisI have already alluded to. It has to do with the often unreflective tendency in sociology to think of the social, and in the postwar period, the social state, as that which 'embeds' the abstractive, de-socialising dynamics of capital. Needless to say, a formidable efficacy, or even performativity, of abstractions seems to characterise a moment dominated by financial instruments of great mathematical complexity, whose negative feedback on individuals and communities is now there for all to see. But we must be careful not to give disciplinary support to the imprecise imaginary of a contemporary reformism,thatwhichseesregards the return of the state and of regulation as a panacea for crisis. As a number of commentators have underscored this would be to fundamentally misunderstand the dynamics of neoliberalism (Mattick 2011; Albo, Gindin and Panitch 2010). If we can reasonably 'periodise' neoliberalism – perhaps identifying its inaugural moment in the 1979 Volcker shock – it is not an as an epoch of deregulation and state rollback, but rather as one characterised byof different uses of regulation and a different employment of the regulative capacity of the state – mainly in order to shore up problems of profitability by making possible a kind of 'asset price Keynesianism' (Brenner 2009), and by deeply integrating the working population in a system of financial exploitation and expropriation (among whose symptoms are such staggering statistics as the 57 billion dollars raked in by financial institutions from late repayment charges on credit cards in 2003 alone) (McNally 2011: 124).

As Albo, Gindin and Panitch note in their In and Out of Crisis: 'It is crucial to distinguish between neoliberalism as an ideologically-driven strategy to free markets from states, and as a materially-driven form of social practices and rules which has required state intervention and management to liberalize markets' (2010: 35). And tTo understand this, we may again need to break with much of our sociological and political common sense, and recognise, as they suggest, that: 'As the most recent state interventions make clear, given the current balance of social forces, regulation is about finding a technical way to preserve markets in the face of their volatility, not about any fundamental reordering of relative power in society to conform to social needs'. Crisis, and this is a truism, is itself the principal means of 'regulation' under capitalism. Rather than being bewitched by a simplistic schema pivoting around the disembedding and embedding, or the de-regulating and re-regulating, of capital, sociology should perhaps turn its attention more to the crucial enigma that the impasse in the smooth reproduction of the capital/labour relation posesis posing to any contemporary model of reform. The regressive evocation of the ideology of work combined with increasing unemployment;, the manner in which the credit crunch has broken the precarious balance between depressed wages and continued consumption;, the lived experience of crisis as both daily urgency and interminable horizon;, the novel role of labouring populations as the shock absorbers of transferable risk – these are some of the social tensions and contradictions that sociology should explore, beyond the comfort zone provided by the paradigms which are obsolescent in their very announcement of novelty, and of which 'the new capitalism' is only the most obvious representativewith which we imagine, rather melancholically, the embedding of capitalism in the recent past.