ABSTRACT. Today’s left social movements are challenging formal law and politics for their capitulation to a regime of racial capitalism. In this Feature, I argue that we must reconceive our relationship to reform and the popular struggles in which they are embedded. I examine the turn of left social movements to “non-reformist reforms” as a framework for reconceiving reform: not as an end goal but as struggles to reconstitute the terms of life, death, and democracy. Non-reformist reforms aim to undermine the prevailing political, economic, social order, construct an essentially different one, and build democratic power toward emancipatory horizons. Today’s thinking about non-reformist reform is both an effort to rethink the kinds of laws, policies, norms, relationships, and modes of organization that we might build to govern society, and an effort to democratize relations of power: to have fundamentally different people at the helm.
Part I identifies the return of a commonsense on the left that racism and capitalism are entangled and co-constitutive of the unequal and undemocratic world. Part II lays out left critiques of reformism and offers a schematic history for “non-reformist reforms” as a competing conceptual frame to the neoliberal or liberal reformism dominant in the legal academy. In centering productive contradictions between reform and revolution, the heuristic requires engaging with systems as they are, allows one to hold in view bold and radical horizons, and facilitates the identification of strategic battles that might serve as a bridge through popular agitation.
Because non-reformist reforms emerge from theories of change rooted in building popular power, Part III attends to actually existing sites of struggle in the United States: abolition and decriminalization; decolonization and decommodification; and democratization. I turn to major campaigns, including #StopCopCity in Atlanta; organizing to cancel rent by KC Tenants in Kansas City, Missouri, and to cancel student debt by the Debt Collective; and the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) joint campaign for the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Green New Deal.
Part IV turns to the disciplinary reorientations required for engaging law as a partial terrain of mass politics. I outline four fundamental distinctions between non-reformist reforms and liberal and neoliberal approaches to reform. Non-reformist reforms require a horizon beyond legalism; they embrace antagonism and conflict rather than depoliticization and neutrality; they aim to shift the balance of power; and they build mass organization and prepare the people to govern.
AUTHOR. Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Law, The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law.
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