Reformism Quotes

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters ~ Audre Lorde

Labourism was to be the bete noire of the Party, hated as much as the capitalist system itself. Its growth was to lead to the hardening of Party attitudes almost to the point where even the wish to improve everyday conditions was considered iniquitous. The resentment was heated by the fact that many of the rising Labour leaders had been fellow members of the Social Democratic Federation and once professed the revolution.No words were strong enough for the Party's contempt. In the the Socialist Standard they were 'fakirs', a strong allusion to self-seeking piety, and on the platforms 'Labour bleeders',... ~ Robert Barltrop

The problem of the seizure of power brings in its train the problem of the State. The State and the
Revolution (1917), which deals with this subject, is the strangest and most contradictory of pamphlets.
Lenin employs in it his favorite method, which is the method of authority. With the help of Marx and
Engels, he begins by taking a stand against any kind of reformism which would claim to utilize the
bourgeois State - that organism of domination of one class over another. The bourgeois State owes its
survival to the police and to the army because it is primarily an instrument of oppression. It reflects both
the irreconcilable antagonism of the classes and the forcible subjugation of this antagonism. This
authority of fact is only worthy of contempt. ~ Albert Camus

If debates about beauty in nineteenth-century
France were fierce, that was because beauty was seen to matter. This
was a world of political revolutions, of social reformism, of belief in
progress and human perfectibility. Why was it that beauty mattered so
much in such a world?. ~ Elizabeth Prettejohn

Look inside yourself and recognize that change starts with you. It starts with me. It starts with all of us. ~ Jared Bush

A conservative government survives essentially by dampening expectations and subduing hopes. Conservatism is basically pessimistic; reformism is basically optimistic. ~ Gough Whitlam

These days even mere attempts to improve capitalism are often called 'Socialism,' while in reality they are only reforms. ~ Alexander Berkman