Reformism

A guide for operating within a political system created by and for another class

An obligatory article written across eras on a rare yet Sisyphean theme will stress the importance of "reformist struggles" as if each new generation requires the same ideas be reconstituted before them. These articles are contrasted with the rest of the writings of these authors, where you will often find them arguing against reformists. What leads to such a difference in the volume of writing on each topic is that while there are many ways one can do reformism wrong, there is only one wrong way to oppose reformism, and that is by opposing it.

Reformism can be defined as changes and actions that can be taken through the existing institutions of the existing society. Revolution would be changing those institutions or the creation of new ones. Reforms can be geared towards revolution, and revolution can facilitate reforms. What matters far more than this distinction is who is doing the reforms and revolutions. A different class can use the institutions of another to pass its own reforms, but without a revolution where that class institutes its own institutions, the original class will continue to use the intuitions they created that suit them even though another class might now have access to the institution the original class set up. Therefore the best thing a class could use the institutions of another class to do would be to establish their own institutions to the point they no longer need to use another class's institutions. The institutions they set up will be naturally more suited to them than the institutions they will have to awkwardly try to fit themselves into.

During the Middle Ages, the main institutions of society were the "Church" and the "Crown", representing the interests of the clergy and nobility classes respectively. Their legitimacy emanated from God, or from what was called "ancient right", which is a fancy way of saying "nobody can remember a time when things were different". An eternal God is unlikely to change His mind, and "ancient rights" can only be changed through mass amnesia, so such a society is unlikely to engage in much reformism regardless of who is doing it. When the Monarch did grant powers to other individuals or classes, usually to aid him in his struggle against the Church or his nobles, these were called "Privileges" rather than Rights, however, they were often treated like Rights by those that held them and their jealous guarding might transform them into Rights after enough time had passed and it was forgotten under what circumstance they had originated.

Among these Privileges that were transformed into Rights were Parliaments. Originally they existed to facilitate taxation, as while the King might have had the Right to tax as he pleased, that didn't necessarily give him the ability to do so. Therefore he bestowed Privileges upon Parliaments to allow them to talk (Parler) about those taxes ahead of time and get everybody on board with this tax to ensure compliance with the collection later on. Later generations may have interpreted this Privilege as a Right, and so claimed they had the Right to collect taxes for the king, or at the very least they might argue that the privileges extended to them by past Kings were just as valid as privileges extended by current Kings and that they could not be withdrawn without challenging the authority of Kings to make decisions and extend privileges in general, and so privileges became just as good as rights. Later a king might grant the Parliament the privilege of voting on the kinds of taxes that will be levied, and this Privilege jealously guarded into a Right might make Parliaments be under the impression that they had the sole authority to levy taxes, or at least levy new taxes, rather than this being a prerogative reserved for the king. Existing taxes could be supported without parliamentary approval in the same way that unquestioning support of the decisions made by prior generations is what granted these parliaments the authority to do all these things in the first place.

With the rights of the parliament secured the capacity for participants in those parliaments to engage in parliamentary reformism began, something which continues to this day. However, those who could engage in parliamentary reformism were of a specific class. Given their purpose was to facilitate taxation (collect money), they were composed of people who had money, or at the very least if they were part of the parliament they certainly “had money” by being in the parliament be it either by leveraging their position to obtain it or even just by the nature of the position being one that makes one direct money regardless of if it is technically theirs. Parliaments by their very nature presuppose that money exists and would be pointless without it. They are at their core an institutions where those that represent money go to decide how the money will manifest in society, and so are a class institution of the class defined by money, and continue to be so regardless of who would reside within them and make decisions. The money class comes together to form this institution because by coming together they will have more money and therefore the ability to fund more things together than they could alone.

Labour or some other class might seize control of this institution of money, but the ability of labour to decide how money is to be used to compel labour to act in particular ways does not make that an institution of labour. Instead, by analogy with a parliament being money coming together to decide how money should operate would be labour coming together to decide on how labour should operate, which labour would do when it seeks to accomplish things that require more labour than one person can reasonably provide by themselves. Only if these decisions are made directly, unmediated by the institutions of another class (such as money, which is itself an institution, one which has been reformed extensively to further the needs of the money class, from gold to paper to digital transactions) could such an institution truly be a “labour” institution, rather than an institution of labourers promoted to the rank of the rulers of money.

Ultimately the world in which money is free to be used in whichever way it so desires is the Liberal society. The class that sought this freedom was the Bourgeois class, and this bourgeoisie usurped the power and authority of the Crown and the Church away to the point that it was the institution that decided how the money would be collected and used which would decide how everything would be run. Once more by analogy, this class and its institutions could also be usurped by an institution composed of labourers deciding on how labour should be used. This is because collecting money and deciding how to use it is only influential because that money can be used to compel labour to do things, and this power to compel labour to do things was the real power in society, not the authority of the king, and that is why they could overthrow the King. However, just like how money wanted to become free of the church and crown to decide on how to use itself to compel labour to do things as it saw fit, labour can become free to decide on how labour should be used. The difference between this freedom and the freedom of money is that the freedom of money necessarily requires the class of labourers to exist to be compelled to do things, whereas the freedom of labour does not require any other classes to exist to exercise its freedom, as the people making the decisions and executing those decisions will be the same.

"Liberal" or Bourgeois Reformism can be defined as the bourgeoisie/liberals trying to use bourgeois/liberal institutions to try to create a "more perfect" bourgeois society and in the sense of what currently exists this is trying to "perfect" what liberals considers to be "democracy" this can be called the "democratic" movement. The power and sanctity of the parliament is considered to be the same as the power of the people, so anyone challenging parliament is considered to be challenging the will of the people. This of course needs to be explained exactly as such for anyone to understand, without that explanation challenging parliament would basically just be challenging a bunch of people pontificating in an old building, no different that challenging the pontiff in his old building the way Luther did.

The debate over how to improve or "protect" democracy is waged by the reformist and conservative wings of the democratic movement respectively. The democratic method of ruling being dominant for so long means that it is increasingly “conservative” rather than “reformist”, as through time it has been able to tweak things to be exactly as it would want to be and so any new developments are seen as threats that emanate from some outside non-democratic force, but it is important to remember that the terms as they are being used have little to do with any label which might be being used conventionally. So conservative means protecting existing power and institutions rather than being "A Conservative" necessarily. Although Conservatives may fall into this camp, so may Liberals or "Socialists". Learning to recognize what the practical relationship people have towards the existing ruling power can help avert the collapse of concepts into nothing more than labels.

While now almost entirely conservative, which to say trying to "protect" existing institutions, the "democratic" movement was also at the time revolutionary in the past before its reformist phase, which itself preceded its now conservative phase. This revolutionary democratic phase would consist of challenging bourgeoise institutions in a revolutionary reconstructive manner, but with the ultimate goal of creating different and presumably better bourgeoise institutions. Although what constituted "better" was determined between the more conservative factions of the bourgeoisie who wanted the old institutions which they thought were better, or the reformist or revolutionary wings that thought their changes made it better, usually these wings might represent different levels of wealth or kinds of wealth with each thinking better institutions were what they found most suitable to their particular narrow needs and interests. Small capital thought the best bourgeoise society might be one that is best for small capital, and large capital thought it was the one suitable for large capital. The underlying nature of the society might stay the same but the democratic movement might feel the need to go outside of its institutional bounds to make changes to its institutions, in part because a different faction who seeks different institutions can become temporarily dominant enough to impose their own idea of how institutions should be run, or which institutions should exist. As such the democratic movement can have its own discussions over reformism or revolution, and after the initial great Bourgeois Revolutions, both constitutional and republican, had established the bourgeois society, both bourgeois democratic reformism and bourgeois democratic revolutions transformed it further and established what can be described as the electoral democracies with universal suffrage that exist in most countries.

Electoral democracies could be transformed further through both democratic reformism using the existing electoral process or democratic revolution which would be demanding changes be implemented to the political structure of society by mass movements without changing the bourgeois nature of society. The difference between using reformism or revolution to make changes to the political structure of society is largely an irrelevant question since it is how the structure can be used by any group that defines it in the long run. Given that universal suffrage includes workers, and not just property owners in the way that the bourgeois electoral democracy was initially envisioned, this means that it is possible for workers or the proletariat to use existing institutions to attempt to pursue their interests even if the structure is still weighted against them for various reasons, such as the necessity of the political campaign which requires money to operate in, and so is weighted towards those who can provide money. This is because the elected representative rather than trying to collect voters is, in reality, trying to collect the money that can deliver them voters, and so requires the cooperation of money suppliers more so than voters (and incidentally a person cannot reasonably hear from every single voter but they can hear from a select number of donors so there are limitations that needing to have a particular person in this position impose which veer towards needing a small group of supporters one can manage more so than a large group of supporters even if in theory one is supposed to have a large group of supporters)

For any further proposed democratic reform or revolutionary demand, what matters for the labourers or proletariat is how the newly established democratic institutions will include the proletariat within them. The democratic movement was and still is in the interest of the proletariat for the simple reason that while the democratic movement merely seeks to improve upon bourgeois society instead of abolishing it, the changes it carries out grant the proletariat the potential to have a political place within it, however minor that place might seem. As such the proletariat has historically been allies with the democratic movement, but that does not mean they continue to be allies with the democrats once the democratic movement has carved out a potential place for them within the institutions of bourgeois society. There is no obligation for “clientism” here where you need to somehow graciously aid the one who granted you this place at the table simply because they gave it to you, even if the one who gave you that seat might expect you to be gracious about it.

Once they have a place, however small it may be, in addition to trying to increase their relative representation the proletariat may begin to use that representation to accomplish its own proletarian reformism through those institutions and this proletarian reformism will be totally different than the democratic reforms or revolutions that granted them representation in the first place. Naturally, proletarian reforms will center proletarian interests rather than merely be about “representation” as the democratic movement has focused on, as representation for a class is useless if it can not be used to pursue the specific interests of that class, and so the proletariat ought to pursue proletarian interests with its representation.

This gets you into the problem of what proletarian interests are, but like when a member of the first estate of France, a Catholic clergyman of commoner descent, wrote the pamphlet "What is the Third Estate?" (an estate composed of commoners who were not members of the clergy) he answered that it was everything, it had been nothing, and that it desired to be something, which effectively left the question open to be answered by the Third Estate. Similarly, the question of what reforms could be the proletariat's interests is ultimately left up to the proletariat, and there are countless reforms the proletariat could pursue. As such what is more important is to have a proletarian party for the proletariat to pursue reforms within, more so than to vote for a party promising a particular reform. After all, even if they do deliver that reform as promised, what would they be supposed to be doing afterward? They’d just spend the rest of the time pursuing the interest of the class they actually represent.

This is because the "democratic" movement as it established itself was dominated by the petit-bourgeoisie, perhaps not explicitly but the idea of including everyone within the democratic system had a petit-bourgeois conception of what "everyone" meant. An example of this might be the idea of "the common person" as contrasted with "the wealthy", which mirrors the earlier grand bourgeois struggle of the "commoners" contrasted with the nobility, although that was not a difference of wealth, rather of status, as the grand bourgeoisie was often richer than the nobility.

The democratic concept of "the common person" might technically include the proletariat within it, but it is a petit-bourgeoise mindset to view these things in terms of those who have a lot versus those who have a little as the thing in question that each might have a lot or little of would be money, or “capital” in the sense that the money is used to compel labourers to do things. Naturally, labour is distinct from small capital in that labour has no real need to compel labour to do anything since it already is labour. The petit-bourgeois is "petit" because they have little capital, but they still are capital and therefore view their relationship with the rich as merely being one of quantity rather than there being some qualitative difference between them.

In their view, the "rich" simply have more money than they know what to do with and this is contrasted with everyone else who is limited in their options by having little, and if one could just get access to some of that capital that the rich hoard then everyone could be better off. Contrary to this petit-bourgeois mindset, that the grand bourgeoisie has far more capital than they could ever need does not stop them from being limited in their options, as the grand bourgeoise will still only use their capital in ways that will give a return on that capital so the grand bourgeoise is just as limited in their options as those with little capital, with the relative scale of the capital and so the end volume of the return on that capital being the only difference, but where the capital might go will be similar in both cases. Therefore whether capital is big or small does not change the kinds of things that will be done with that capital, and so it is always used to control labour.

The relationship of the proletariat to capital by contrast is more defined by the total volume of capital in society than it is by the distribution of capital across society amongst people within it, and so long as capital is capital and it seeks a return, different ways of organizing the society of capital merely change the speed at which the volume of capital grows from that return. In terms of mere distribution, the practical difference between highly concentrated capital and dispersed capital for the proletariat is minor as a workplace is still a workplace regardless of how wealthy the employer is.

The proletariat's existence is ensured by selling their labour to capital, and so the minimum required capital that proletariat must have personally to exist is zero, and its collective existence is ensured by the collective body of capital that might hire it, as such technically a large volume of capital is something which ensures thereby a large proletariat, even to the detriment of others as capital will seek to create that large proletariat to ensure the existence of that large capital. Small capital has only the fact that they might not seek to create a proletariat to argue they will be "nicer" to the proletariat, but even that is still a petit-bourgeoise interest as all this means is the petit-bourgeoisie is saying they won’t try to turn each other into proletariat the way large capital does.

The petit-bourgeoisie existence is dependent on claiming ownership of some kind of capital, even if abstracted and not necessarily viewed as capital in accounting terms (for instance an “education” can be a kind of abstract capital that one carries through one's life that one leverages throughout it. Education took time and money to acquire and while it can’t be sold it is not that different in inducing behaviours in one who possesses it than behaviours induced in someone who dedicated that time to acquiring some kind of physical capital that they use to produce directly). This physical or abstracted capital is something they wish to not lose, and they will attempt to organize their life and society around that capital they claim, and may seek to make sure this capital remains a kind of capital, (for instance by ensuring that it is difficult to replicate or by requiring it be used through credentialism). There will always be a ratio of infinite difference of no required capital to any amount of required capital whether big or small, whereas the petit-bourgeoisie fears the vast volume of capital they do not have that threatens to dwarf them. The proletariat simply doesn't require any amount of capital for them to exist, yet they exist in a world filled by it, creating it and are created by it, entirely apart from it and forming its core, because capital requires them for it to exist and so long as capital exists it will make a proletariat that must work to maintain capital, or else the capital would cease to be meaningful.

The petit-bourgeoisie and this mindset of big vs small created by the vast gulf in the distribution of capital saw an ally in the proletariat against the increasing concentration of capital and so extended the franchise to them, perhaps fearing their own descent into the ranks of the proletariat, or at least below any monetary threshold set by the political system that might distinguish them from the proletariat. In earlier times that may have been explicit property requirements but nowadays these might be the means to finance political campaigns. In either case, removing these barriers set up to disenfranchise the petit-bourgeoisie and the proletariat together in bourgeois democracy are democratic reforms that can benefit both classes together and are worth pursuing together, but can be achieved with separate parties that merely work together on common issues.

This is because the fear of common disenfranchisement is not worth forgoing the opportunity to use what little political power the proletariat can obtain for itself to at least attempt to institute its own reforms, even if only to make clear what the proletariat's unique demands are as contrasted with the petit-bourgeoisie's demands, or to create a common set of demands that it could seek to implement through other avenues available to it that are not available to the petit-bourgeoisie like making direct demands for those things upon employers. Contrary to the petit-bourgeois notion of "big vs small" the proletariat matches the "big" of the bourgeoisie with its own "big" that comes from the fact that big capital cannot function without a big number of proletariat, whereas the petit-bourgeois are superfluous to big capital and instead merely exist in the spaces that big capital has overlooked.

Therefore while a disfranchised petit-bourgeois is rendered powerless, the proletariat still retains a power of its own even when disenfranchised from the official political process, meaning that fearing a common disenfranchisement and accomplishing nothing else is placing the interests of the petit-bourgeoisie over the interests of the proletariat since the petit-bourgeois has more to lose from disenfranchisement. That the proletariat also loses (at least a little) from the threatened disenfranchisement however means that an independent proletarian party would also be in opposition to those disenfranchising measures, and given how important avoiding those measures is to the petit-bourgeoisie, it would make more sense for them to support the proletarian party out of common interest if it truly is necessary that all "common people" must support the same party to avoid disenfranchisement. However, instead it is asserted that the proletariat has no choice but to support the democratic reformist parties dominated by petit-bourgeois interests and are discouraged from voting for proletarian reformist parties.

Often the democratic parties don't even offer any such tangible reforms that supposedly benefit "everyone" anymore anyway because of how comfortable they have gotten in their position and therefore cannot even be referred to as reformist even for the petit-bourgeoisie, in practice they are dominated by the bourgeoisie itself now.

Previous reformist administrations may have passed some reforms and now, because the institutions created by the bourgeois class were not fundamentally reformed to exclude them, the reformist parties endlessly go on about how the bourgeois parties they did nothing to eliminate are going to take back power and remove all those reforms. The “peaceful transfer of power” is considered a fundamental virtue of the system, so if your plan consists of doing things that can be easily reversed when an event people not only expect but even celebrate happens then you have a fundamental problem in your plan and expectations. More likely than simply forgetting that an election victory now does not mean an election victory forever until the sun becomes a red giant, these “reformist” parties are banking on this phenomenon to be able to endlessly use the threat of something being taken away to continue to drive votes until the end times of the red giant.

The reason this is the case is that the bourgeois institution of the proletariat transforms those who participate in it into someone who has the capabilities and influence of someone who is bourgeois as having a voice in the institution that directs money makes someone one of the people who can direct money. This transformed individual differs in one way from a conventional bourgeois individual, namely that to retain this influence they need to retain their position within that institution indefinitely. This is usually called “opportunism”, but I will distinguish that word from merely being opportunistic, which is to be responsive to the conditions as they present themselves. Rather this “opportunism” is created not by responding to the general development of conditions in the world around you, but rather by a class of opportunists who must do everything in their power to retain their positions in institutions indefinitely, and therefore will forgo opportunities to exercise their influence if they might risk that position.

The opportunists are created because the institution they must operate within is bourgeois and must so they must replicate that bourgeois society to have any influence at all. Conventional political theory even accounts for this and makes it clear that one cannot reasonably expect any institution to act against the propagation of its own influence. However anything can also happen for any reason, and one can reasonably briefly use one institution to create another more favourable institution, it simply can’t be a matter of expecting that permanent participation in the original institution will provide much support for it beyond allowing the new institution to begin accumulating power for itself. This works even better if the new institution already exists beforehand and the old institution is merely recognizing the influence the new institution already has (in which case the revolutionary creation of a new institution would precede the reformist acknowledgment of it). Taken together this means that the primary benefit of participation in bourgeois institutions can bring the proletariat would be to support and acknowledge existing proletarian institutions, rather than simply trying to use the bourgeois institution in the same manner that the bourgeoisie uses it as the primary instrument of them pursuing their class interests. Anything the proletariat attempts to do with bourgeois institutions must be able to outlast their participation within it, lest the accumulation of reforms become vulnerable to generating a class of opportunists who do nothing but promise to maintain those reforms.

One might argue that passing and subsequently defending reforms is in the interest of the proletariat, even if the ultimate outcome of this is there being just enough reforms to create enough fear of loss to perpetually elect a group of people who will maintain that situation by perpetually keeping out anyone else from governance, as this is the optimal situation for the proletariat without reforming any existing institutions. This might not even exclude the possibility of revolutionary change as one might advocate for revolutionary activity alongside this effective endorsement of rule by opportunists. This is however tantamount to declaring the proletariat ought to be completely non-participatory in bourgeois institutions because they are not possible to be used in a revolutionary manner, despite seeming like it is the opposite. Any position which views the existing institutions as being fundamentally separate from the proletariat’s revolutionary goals ends up being effectively the same even if the endorsed activity (or non-activity) within the bourgeois institution is different.

There is only one proletariat, and each person in the proletariat is only one person, while they can, in theory, compartmentalize their interaction with bourgeois institutions as being separate from overthrowing those institutions to replace them with their own, there is exactly zero reason why they can’t be trying to overthrow those institutions while participating in them. They should not put their interests on hold to participate (or not participate) in an election, the proletariat never ceases to be the proletariat even as the political process passes it by. The proletariat’s behavior towards bourgeois institutions should be identical both within and without those institutions, and as such if the proletariat means to abolish private property or something that is the same as doing that even if it is described differently, then it ought to say that it is trying to do that directly. The impossibility of doing this with a bourgeois institution is of no consequence. There might be legal barriers to the authority of the very institution they inhabit to making that happen but it is well enough to have to run up against those legal barriers instead of just pronouncing it impossible.

If it requires some kind of supermajority in a supermajority of different localities to even try, so be it, and in fact that you know what it would take to even attempt this proves that it isn’t impossible, it could happen, it would just take the set of circumstance you think are impossible to occur, so no reason to not say you would try to do it because it is, in fact, possible to organize enough people in enough locations to make that happen, it is just highly unlikely. While you might not even get that far as to try to test the legal barriers, might as well say you would intend to do so, so long as you make it clear that this is not the only way you would intend to do this, and so keep other options open for yourself. Whether it is a question of running up against legal barriers, or of organizing enough people in enough places to make it happen, you might soon come to realize that while the attempt was to go through the institutions, the bourgeois opposition to this will begin to operate outside those institutions anyway, and so your activity within the institution can simply be a precursor to your response to the opposition outside the institution. This is no different than if you organized separately from the institution to oppose the institution, as ultimately the bourgeois will not allow its direct interest in private property to be challenged. Therefore the point of trying to use bourgeois institutions to abolish bourgeois property would be to force such a confrontation to come to pass, because this final confrontation is going to take place regardless, having control of the institution simply allows you to control the time and place of this confrontation, but you can always have this confrontation by some other means, but having the ability to force it to take place is a decent enough thing to pursue even if it is a longshot.

Of course, abolishing bourgeois property might not be the only thing the proletariat is trying to do as it might have other goals that it comes up with and so it will pursue those goals with the same straightforwardness. Whatever this organization of the proletariat comes up with to attempt to pursue is worth pursuing, so long as it is indeed the organization of the proletariat selecting it to be pursued. Simply as a matter of being organized around anything can be a means of having the proletariat organized, which would help accomplish other things later, but as such ensuring there is an organization of the proletariat to pursue things is important for accomplishing that. Thus even if not directly challenging bourgeois property, it is important to distinguish the proletariat from bourgeois parties, which means the proletarian party being separate from the existing bourgeois parties, and even if separate it is important for the internal organization of this party to be different than the parties that are organized along bourgeois lines. In short, this means that internal policy decisions need to be made in ways that can’t be controlled by money interests were those money interests to try to control those internal processes. Select people at random if you have to, whatever it takes to make sure the proletarian party is not susceptible to being run in a bourgeois manner like the other parties. The model where you do fundraising to get a candidate good at fundraising is the material core that creates the existing bourgeois democratic system, and even if you attempt to do the same thing while being dedicatd to proletarian interests, the bourgeoisie is simply going to be better at it. Therefore instead of the “campaigning” model where you try to get a party you created elected, it might make more sense to form a party out of existing proletarian groups such as unions that will simply agree to vote for their combined selected candidate in a kind of labour conference that has a party that represents that conference. Therefore the political party will merely be acting as an extension of those organizations rather than something separate from them that is trying to collect their votes. That this has “no chance of winning” is once more irrelevant, as the purpose is literally to provide representation for those organizations and the people within them, which is incidentally the way the system of representative democracy is intended to work, with campaigning being a later invention which technically didn't need to exist.

Indeed nobody ever said democracy was supposed to work in this way where some person declares they are running, collects money, and then uses that money to tell people to vote for them, nobody ever said that a group composed of many people could not literally just elect itself into the parliament to the extent that it has the numbers to do so while ignoring everything else that is going on.

The objections to this will revolve around notions of “optimal voting strategies” which categorize a bunch of disparate interests as being “more similar” to each other than others, but this cry presupposes all these disparate interests will forgo themselves for the “similar good”. Such an argument is only effective if your reason to participate in the election is to win power to govern, but the proletariat has the luxury of the governance always being against them regardless of who wins. Even if this proletarian party does win the “optimal voting strategy” in that case the optimal governing decision would be to immediately abolish the mechanism by which anyone could “vote to win” such an election given that anyone else winning would just be against them. Therefore abolition of the very election or even the entire institutional apparatus the proletarian party just "won" is the only reason the proletarian party would even have to “win” anyway. Some countries cheekily have made it impossible for a party that would seek to abolish the conditions by which they came to power to run in the first place, but in that case, I’m sure they would be caught a logical trap figuring out what it means if you announce that you aren’t even trying to win in the first place. Regardless even if the laws make it impossible to be that blatant about everything, the notion of not even needing to win liberates you from the petit-bourgeois democrat whining about how you need to support a particular party to stop another from winning.

The proletarian party doesn’t need to win elections because it ultimately can operate outside them entirely. The proletariat can be revolutionary and decide this whole reform business is superfluous to its needs, as the institution which controls the money which compels labour to do things is powerless if labour will not be compelled, and thus the institution can be abolished from without, rather than from within. However that the proletariat can do this doesn’t mean it can’t participate in the bourgeois political institutions, and so can do things from within which might facilitate the abolition of those institutions from without. It is just that its participation within those institutions must be the proletariat acting on its own rather than as part of some bourgeois political block. Therefore what matters most of all is remaining politically separate from the bourgeoisie instead of just acting as some bourgeois faction would require.