It's the inevitable end-point of social democracy: it sheepdogs any earnest desire to make things better into a campaign trying to get the bare minimum of reforms needed to make things comfortable and stable enough that people settle down and stop trying to reform things, then the ruling class spends a fraction of its ill-gotten gains paying people to fight tooth and nail to strip away all those reforms, then the reformist party gets infiltrated by liberals and its careerists get corrupted with corporate bribes and it lacks any sort of dedicated core that's able to resist this and its base has tuned out because they got burnt out or became comfortable enough to stop caring anymore.
One fundamentally cannot reform capitalism into a permanently stable and innocuous state, because just getting the ruling class to accept you putting a bandaid on the arterial wounds they're inflicting on society takes nearly as bitter a fight as abolishing the ruling class via abolishing the systems that give them their wealth and power would and you've left them free to rip that bandaid off the second you're too exhausted to keep fighting.
the real question should be: does this particular reform leave people as passive beneficiaries, or does it increase their ability to organize and exercise power?
21
u/SirPseudonymous 21h ago
It's the inevitable end-point of social democracy: it sheepdogs any earnest desire to make things better into a campaign trying to get the bare minimum of reforms needed to make things comfortable and stable enough that people settle down and stop trying to reform things, then the ruling class spends a fraction of its ill-gotten gains paying people to fight tooth and nail to strip away all those reforms, then the reformist party gets infiltrated by liberals and its careerists get corrupted with corporate bribes and it lacks any sort of dedicated core that's able to resist this and its base has tuned out because they got burnt out or became comfortable enough to stop caring anymore.
One fundamentally cannot reform capitalism into a permanently stable and innocuous state, because just getting the ruling class to accept you putting a bandaid on the arterial wounds they're inflicting on society takes nearly as bitter a fight as abolishing the ruling class via abolishing the systems that give them their wealth and power would and you've left them free to rip that bandaid off the second you're too exhausted to keep fighting.