Reformist Quotes
It is time for those who love liberal democracy to join hands with Islam's reformists. Here is a clue to who's who: Moderate Muslims denounce violence committed in the name of Islam but insist that religion has nothing to do with it; reformist Muslims, by contrast, not only deplore Islamist violence but admit that our religion is used to incite it.
Irshad Manji
Although we revolutionary socialists are always accused of being Utopian, nothing strikes me as more Utopian than the reformist belief that with a bit of tinkering and some good faith, we can systematically improve the world. You have to ask how many decades of broken promises and failed schemes it will take to disprove that hope. Marxism isn't about saying you'll get a perfect world: it's about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it's hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now. In a world where 30,000 to 40,000 children die of malnutrition daily while grain ships are designed to dump food into the sea if the price dips too low, it's worth the risk.
China Miéville
From the changes that have occurred in the world, there must be drawn correct, revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist conclusions: there must be drawn such conclusions as not to create reformist and pacifist illusions and weaken the struggle against imperialism, but to strengthen ever more this just struggle: there must be drawn such conclusions as not to alienate the peoples from the cause of revolution, but bring them ever closer to it, not divert them from the struggle for their national liberation, but raise this struggle to an ever higher level.
Enver Hoxha
The reformist illusion was paid for and is being paid for by the working class, its leaders and parties, which heroically and tragically defended it to the last moment, confirming in a dramatic fashion the phrase of the XVIII Century French revolutionary Louis de Saint-Just: "Those who make revolution half way only dig their own graves."
Miguel Enríquez
What is necessary is for workers and the left to obtain all the lessons the Chilean experience can offer, so that we never again make these errors. That's why I maintain, that in Chile the left has not failed, socialism has not failed, nor has the revolution failed, nor have workers failed. What came to a tragic end in Chile was the reformist illusion of modifying socio-economic structures and making revolutions before the pasive consent of those to be most affected: the ruling classes.
Miguel Enríquez
The reformist project put in place by the U. P. enclosed itself within the bourgeois order...it aimed to forge an alliance with sectors of the bourgeoisie, it didn't lean on the revolutionary organizations of the working class, in its own organs of popular power, it rejected an alliance with rank and file soldiers and sub officers in the armed forces, it sought to seal an alliance with the bourgeois faction. The reformist illusions allowed the ruling classes to prevail in the superstructure of the state from where it launched its reactionary counter offensive, by, firstly, leaning on industrialist federations, on the petty-bourgeoisie and finally on high-ranking officials of the Chilean Armed Forces...
Miguel Enríquez
We are going through a crucial historical crisis in which each year poses more acutely the global problem of rationally mastering the new productive forces and creating a new civilization. Yet the international working-class movement, on which depends the prerequisite overthrow of the economic infrastructure of exploitation, has registered only a few partial local successes. Capitalism has invented new forms of struggle (state intervention in the economy, expansion of the consumer sector, fascist governments) while camouflaging class oppositions through various reformist tactics and exploiting the degenerations of working-class leaderships. In this way it has succeeded in maintaining the old social relations in the great majority of the highly countries, but must develop conflicts posing the question of power everywhere.
Guy Debord
Contemporary man has begun to lose his naiveté as ... the deep causes of the situation in which he finds himself are becoming clearer. He realizes that to attack these deep causes is the indispensable prerequisite for radical change. And so he has gradually abandoned a simple reformist attitude regarding the existing social order, for, by its very shallowness this reformism perpetuates the existing system.
Gustavo Gutiérrez
Modern ideas have had a home in Afghanistan since the 19th century. Several Islamist reformist movements started in Afghanistan before spreading to Central Asia and beyond. Afghanistan's social- democratic, liberal, nationalist, Marxist, Maoist and Islamist parties provided a rich tapestry of ideologies until the '70s.
Amir Taheri